AN OUTLINE 



IRISH HISTORY 



AN OUTLINE 



IRISH HISTORY 



FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE 
PRESENT DAY. 



JUSTIN H. McCarthy 



TtkR /i <? 



^s^^^' 



Baltimore 
JOHN MURPHY & CO. 

1883 






By TraaiA? 
JUN 6 l«l/ 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PA6B 

I. THE LEGENDS ...... 7 

II. CHRISTIANITY - . - - - - 21 

HI. THE NORMAN CONQUEST - - - - - 27 

IV. ELIZABETH - - . - - - 39 

V. THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT - - - - 49 

VI. THE RESTORATION — WILLIAM OF ORANGE - - "59 

VII. THE EIGHTEENTH CENX,\^R.Y . . - - - - 67 

VIII. EMMET — O'CONNELL - - - - - - 83 

IX. YOUNG IRELAND — FENIANISM - - - * 95 

X. THE LAND QUESTION . - . . - 106 

XI. HOME RULE — THE LAND LEAGUE - - - - I16 



AN 

OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE LEGENDS. 



As we peer doubtfully into the dim past of Irish history 
we seem to stand like Odysseus at the yawning mouth 
of Hades. The thin shades troop about us, and flit 
hither and thither frtfully in shadowy confusion. State- 
ly kings sweep by in their painted chariots. Yellow- 
haired heroes rush to battle shaking their spears and 
shouting their war-songs, while the thick gold torques 
rattle on arm and throat, and their many-coloured 
cloaks stream on the wind. They sweep by and are 
lost to sight, and their places are taken by others in a 
shifting, splendid, confused pageant of monarchs and 
warriors, and beautiful women for whose love the he- 
roes are glad to die and the kings to peril their crowns; 
and amongst them all move the majestic white-robed 
bards, striking their golden harps and telling the tales 
of the days of old, and handing down the names of he- 
roes for ever. What may we hope to distinguish of this 
weltering world of regal figures, whirled by before our 
eyes as on that infernal wind which seared the eyes of 
Dante ?' The traveller in Egypt goes down into the 
Tombs of the Kings at ancient Thebes. By the flaring 
flicker of a candle he discerns dimly on the walls about 



8 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

him endless processions of painted figures — the images 
of kings and beggars, of soldiers and slaves, of the 
teeming life of ages — portrayed in glowing colours all 
around. ' It is but for a moment, while his candle is 
slowly burning down, that he seems to stand in the 
thronged centuries of Egyptian dynasties with all their 
named and nameless figures; and then he passes out 
again into the upper air and level sunlight of the The- 
ban valley, as one who has dreamed a chaotic dream. 

Groping in the forgotten yesterday of Irish legend is 
like this groping in an Egyptian tomb. We are in a 
great sepulchral chamber — a hall of the dead, whose 
walls are pictured with endless figures, huddled to- 
gether in bewildering fantastic medley. What can we 
make out, holding up our thin taper and gazing doubt- 
fully at the storied walls? Yon fair woman, with the 
crowd of girls about her, is the Lady Ceasair, who came 
to Ireland before the deluge with fifty women and three 
men, Bith, Ladra, and Fintain. The waters swept away 
this curiously proportioned colony, and their place was 
taken ' in the sixtieth year of the age of Abraham ' by 
the parricide Partholan, of the stock of Japhet. For 
three hundred years his descendants ruled, until a pe's- 
tilence destroyed them all. The Nemedhians, under 
Nemedh, loomed up from the shores of the Black Sea 
and swarmed over Ireland. They were harassed by 
plagues and by incessant battlings with the Fomorians, 
a race of savage sea-kings, descendants of Cham, who 
had settled in the Western Isles. In the end the Fo- 
morians triumphed; they drove out the remnant of 
Nemedhians whom plague and sword had spared. This 
remnant fled, some to the north of Europe to become 
the ancestors of the Firbolgs, some to Greece to give a 
parentage to the Tuatha de Danann, and some to Bri- 
tain, which took its name from the Nemedhian leader, 
Briotan-Maol. 

After a time, the first of the Nemedhian refugees, the 
Firbolgs, came back to Ireland, to be soon dispossessed 
by another invasion of Nemedhian descendants, the 
Tuatha de Danann, who came from Greece, and who 
were deeply skilled in all wizardries. Their sorceries 



THE LEGENDS. 9 

stQod them in good stead, for the Firbolgs made a fierce 
resistance. A desperate battle was fought, in which 
the Firbolg king was slain. His grave is still shown on 
the Sligo strand, and it is fabled that the tide will never 
cover it. Nuada, the king of the Tuatha de Danann, 
lost his right hand in this fight, and seems to have gone 
near losing his kingship in consequence, as his warlike 
people would have refused to recognize a mutilated 
monarch. But there were cunning artificers among the 
Greeks. One of these fashioned a silver hand for the 
king, who was known as Nuada of the Silver Hand ever 
after. The first of ' The Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin ' 
belongs to the reign of this Sovereign with the Argent 
Fist — the tale of the fate of the children of Turenn. The 
three sons of Turenn, Brian, Ur, and Urcar, killed Kian 
father of Luga of the Long Arms, and one of the three 
sons of Canta, with whom the three sons of Turenn were 
at feud. Six times the sons of Turenn buried the body of 
their victim, and six times the earth cast it up again, but 
on the seventh burial the body remained in the grave. 
As the sons of Turenn rode from the spot a faint voice 
came from the ground, warning them that the blood they 
had spilled would follow them to the fulfilment of their 
doom. Luga of the Long Arms, seeking for his father, 
came to the grave, and there the stones of the earth took 
voice and told him that his father lay beneath. Luga 
unearthed the body, and vowed vengeance on the sons 
of Turenn over it. He then hastened to Tara, to the 
court of Nuada of the Silver Hand, and denounced the 
sons of Turenn. In those days the friends of any mur- 
dered person might either receive a fine, called ' eric,' 
in compensation, or might seek the death of the mur- 
derer, Luga called for the ' eric' He demanded three 
apples, the skin of a pig, a spear, two steeds and a cha- 
riot, seven pigs, a hound-whelp, a cooking-spit, and 
three shouts on a hill. To this 'eric ' the sons of Tu- 
renn agreed readily enough before all the court. Then 
Luga explained himself more fully. The three apples 
were to be plucked from the garden of Hisberna, in the 
east of the world. They were the colour of burnished 
gold, and of the taste of honey, and cured wounds and 



lO AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

all manner of sickness, and had many other wonderful 
qualities. The garden of Hisberna was carefully 
guarded, and none were allowed to take its precious 
fruit. The pig-skin belonged to the King of Greece, 
and possessed the power of healing whosoever touched 
it. The spear was a venomed weapon with a blazing 
head, belonging to the King of Persia. The two steeds 
and chariot belonged to the King of Sicily. The seven 
pigs were the delight of Asal, King of the Golden Pil- 
lars, for they could be killed and eaten one day, and be- 
come alive and well the next. The hound-whelp be- 
longed to the King of Iroda, and every wild beast of the 
forest fell powerless before it. The cooking-spit be- 
longed to the warlike women of the Island of Fincara, 
who never yet gave a cooking-spit to anyone who did 
not overcome them in battle. The hill on which the 
three shouts had to be given was the hill of Midkena, in 
the north of Lochlann, the country of the Danes, which 
was always guarded by Midkena and his sons, who never 
allowed anyone to shout on it. 

The sons of Turenn were much daunted by this ter- 
rible ' eric,' but they were bound to fulfil it. They set 
sail in an enchanted canoe, the Wave Sweeper, to the 
garden- of Hisberna, and succeeded, by turning them- 
selves into hawks, in carrying off the apples. They then 
visited Greece in the guise of learned poets from Erin, 
and after a desperate fight overcame the King of Greece 
and his champions, and carried off the pig-skin. Leav- 
ing the shores of Greece ' and all its blue streams,' they 
sailed to Persia, where they had to fight another battle 
with the king before they could carry off the blazing 
weapon in triumph. They then voyaged to Sicil}', over- 
came its monarch, and drove off the famous chariot and 
horses. Next came the turn of Asal, King of the Gol- 
den Pillars, but their fame had gone before them, and 
Asal gave up his seven pigs without a contest. He even 
accompanied them to Iroda, and aided them to obtain 
the hound-whelp. 

Meanwhile the fame of the successes of the sons of 
Turenn had come to Erin, and Luga of the Long Arms 
cast a Druidical spell over them, so that they quite for- 



THE LEGENDS. 11 

got the cooking-spit and the three shouts on a hill, and 
came back to Erin thinking that they had fulfilled their 
'eric' But when Luga saw their spoils, he reminded 
them of the unfulfilled part of the compact, and the 
heroes had to set out again with heavy hearts, ior they 
knew that Luga desired their death. When Brian got 
to the Island of Fincara, which lies beneath the sea, his 
beauty so pleased the warlike women that they gave him 
a cooking-spit without any trouble. Now all that was 
left to the heroes to do was to shout the three shouts on 
Midkena's hill. They sailed out into the north till they 
came to it, and there they fought desperately with Mid- 
kena and his sons, and overcame and killed them. But 
they were wounded themselves nigh unto death, and 
with the greatest difficulty they raised three feeble 
shouts on Midkena's hill. Then, wounded as they 
were, they sailed back to Erin, and implored Luga to 
let them taste of the apples of Hisberna, that they 
might recover. But Luga taunted them with the mur- 
der of his father, and would be content' with nothing 
short of their death; so they died, and the blood of. 
Kian was avenged. 

While Nuada's silver hand was making, his place as 
king was taken by a regent named Bres. But when the 
silver hand was finished, Bres had to resign, to his 
great wrath; and he left the country and roused up a 
huge host of Fomorians under Balor of the Mighty 
Blows, and invaded Ireland, and was totally defeated. 
Balor of the Mighty Blows slew the poor silver-handed 
monarch, and was slain in his turn by Luga Long-Arms. 
Then Luga became king himself, and reigned long and 
happily, and many Tuathade Danann reigned after him. 
But their time came at last to be overthrown by a fifth 
set of invaders — the Milesians, the sons of Milidh. The 
Milesians were an Eastern race, whom hoar tradition 
had set seeking a destined island; and they pursued the 
star of their destiny, the fine-eyed Ull-Erin, to the Irish 
shore. But they had no small trouble to win their way; 
the Tuatha de Danann kept them off as long as they 
could by spells and incantations, which wrapped the 
Milesian fleet in thick folds of impenetrable mist, and 



12 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

shook it with storms, and tossed the ships together on 
writhing waves. In that fierce tempest of dark enchant- 
ments many of the sons of Milidh perished; but they 
effected a landing at last, and carried all before them, 
and drove the De Danann into the fastnesses of the 
hills; and the Milesian leaders, Heber and Heremon, 
divided the island between them. They quarrelled 
about the division soon after, and Heremon killed 
Heber and took the whole island to himself — a Milesian 
version of Romulus. To this period belongs the second 
sorrowful tale of Erin — the tale of the fate of the chil- 
dren of Lir. 

After the battle of Tailltenn, in which the Milesians 
won Ireland, the defeated Tuatha de Danann of the 
five provinces met together and chose Bove Derg king 
over them all. Lir, of Shee Finnalia, alone refused to 
acknowledge the new monarch, and retired to his own 
country. Some of the chieftains called for vengeance 
on Lir, but Bove Derg resolved to win his allegiance 
by friendship. He offered him the choice of his three 
foster-daughters — Eve, Eva, and Alva — in marriage. 
Lir relented, recognised the authority of Bove Derg, 
and married Eve, who bore him one daughter, Finola, 
and three sons, Aed, Ficia, and Conn. Eve died. 
Lir was for a time inconsolable, but on the advice of 
Bove Derg he married the second foster-daughter, Eva. 
The new stepmother, after the fashion of fairy tales, 
grew jealous of Lir's love for his children, and, like the 
woman in the German folk-story, turned them into 
swans. Mere metamorphosis did not content her; she 
laid this further doom on the children of Lir — that 
they must pass three hundred years on the smooth Lake 
Darvan, three hundred years on the wild Sea of Moyle, 
and yet three Imndred more on the Western Sea. Nor 
was the spell to be loosened until the sound of a Chris- 
tian bell was first heard in Erin. The only mitigation 
of their sufferings was the privilege of retaining their 
human voices. The wicked stepmother was punished 
by Bove Derg by being turned into a demon of the air; 
but the children of Lir had to dree their weird for the 
nine appointed centuries until the coming of Christian- 



THE LEGENDS. 1 3 

ity, when they were disenchanted by St. Kemoc. In 
their human form they were very old; the saint bap- 
tized them, and they died and went to heaven. 

What shall be said of the hundred and eighteen kings 
of the Milesian race ? Which of those crowned figures 
is Tighearnmas, who first taught the Irish the worship 
of idols, and who distinguished his people into different 
ranks by the different hues of their garments? Or the 
wise Ollav Fodhla ? Or that Cimbaoth, of whom the 
good chronicler Tighernach, Abbot of Clonmacnoise, 
wrote that all the Irish records before him were uncer- 
tain? — a respectable antiquity enough, if we might but 
take this Cimbaoth and his deeds for granted; for 
Pythagoras had just been crowned in the sixteeth 
Olympiad, and Numa Pompilius was still listening to 
the sweet counsels of the nymph Egeria in the cave cele- 
brated by Juvenal, when Cimbaoth reigned. 

Cimbaoth built the Palace of Emania. Ugaine Mor 
laid all Ireland under solemn oath, fearful as the ancient 
pledge by Styx; for he bound them by the visible and 
invisible elements to respect the rule of his race. But 
the oath was like thin air, and bound no one. Ugaine's 
son Lore, and Lore's son Oileel Ainey, were slain by 
Lore's younger brother Corvac. But Corvac did not 
slay the grandson Lara; for the boy feigned idiocy, 
and the cruel king spared him — to his own doom; for 
the boy was brought up by a faithful harper, and in the 
fulness of time married a king's fair daughter, and 
passed over to France, and brought thence an army of 
stout Gaulish spearmen, and came back to his own, 
and slew Corvac, and founded a mighty line. One of 
his most famous descendants was Yeoha, surnamed the 
' Sigher' for the sorrows he endured. For he married 
a fairy bride, whom he loved tenderly; but after a time 
there came a stranger from the land of the fairies, and 
bore her back to the fairy world, and with her went all 
the joy of Yeoha's life. Then his three sons rose in 
shameful rebellion against him, and were all slain, and 
their heads were laid at their father's feet. Good cause 
for sighing had Yeoha. But he was not all unhappy. 
His fairy bride had borne him a fairy daughter, the 



14 ^A' OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

beautiful and gifted Meave, famous in Irish chronicles, 
and destined to fame through all the world as Queen 
Mab. Meave was a fierce, warlike woman, a very 
Semiramis of early Irish stor)^ She married three hus- 
bands, and quarrelled with them all. In her reign oc- 
curred a battle between two bulls, which is recounted 
by the bards with all Homeric gravity. Meave lived a 
hundred years, and waged war with a great hero, 
Cucullin, and at last the fierce queen died and passed 
away. To her time belongs the third of the sorrowful 
tales of Erin— the story of Deirdri, the beautiful daugh- 
ter of the bard Felemi, doomed at her birth to bring 
woe to Ulster. 

Conor Mac Nessa, the King of Ulster, adopted her, 
kept her secluded, like Danae, in a guarded place — not 
so well guarded but that she was once seen by Naesi, 
son of Usna. Naesi fell in love with her, and she with 
him. He carried her off with the aid of his two broth- 
ers, Anli and Ardan. Conor offered to pardon them if 
they came back to Emania, and in the end they did 
agree to return, escorted by a legion of soldiers under 
Fiachy, a gallant young noble. As they approached 
Emania, Deirdri, whose heart forebode evil, declared 
that she saw a blood-red cloud hanging in the distant 
sky. Her fears were well founded. When they drew 
near the king's capital, another noble, Durthacht, with 
another escort, came from Conor, and called upon 
Fiachy to yield him his charge. Fiachy suspected the 
treachery, refused to yield up the sons of Usna and the 
beautiful Deirdri, put them into a palace, and guarded 
it with his troops. It was his duty, he said, to show 
that the sons of Usna had not trusted in vain to the 
king's word or his good faith. Then Durthacht began the 
assault. The sons of Usna wished to surrender them- 
selves, but Fiachy would not allow this — would not even 
permit them to take any share in the defence; it was his 
duty, and his alone. Then the sons of Usna and Deirdri 
withdrew into the palace, and Deirdri and Naesi played 
chess, and Anli and Ardan looked on while the battle 
raged outside. This battle deserves a place in story 
with the fierce strife in the halls of Attila which ends the 



THE LEGENDS. 15 

' Niebelungen Lied/ All through the bloody struggle 
the sons of Usna seemed intent alone upon the game 
they were playing, and as defence after defence of the 
palace was taken they remained unmoved, till at last 
Fiachy was killed, and the enemy rushed in and slew 
the sons of Usna at the board, and carried off Deirdri to 
Conor. But the king had no joy of her, for she killed 
herself soon after. 

Meave's descendants ruled till the reign of Fiacha 
Finnolaidh, when there occurred a revolt of some tribes 
called the Attacotti, under a leader nicknamed 'Cat- 
Head.' They slew the king, and placed Cat-Head on 
his throne. After his death the rightful heirs came back, 
and the earth showed its approval by bountiful produce; 
fruitful meadows, fishful rivers, and many-headed woods 
proclaimed the joy of the Irish earth at the return of its 
true lords. But the Attacotti rose again and killed a 
rightful king, and a curse came upon the earth, and it 
was fruitless and cornless and Ashless, till once again a 
king of the old race, Tuathal, seized the throne from the 
usurpers, and pledged the people by sun and moon 
and elements to leave the sceptre untroubled to his 
posterity. Tuathal then took a piece of land from each 
of the four provinces, and formed the kingdom of Meath 
to be the dwelling of the Ard-righ; and he built there 
four painted palaces, one for the king of each province. 

Conn of the Hundred Fights, beloved of the bards, 
is the next famous king. After Conn's death the land 
passed to a usurper, Mac Con, for a time onl)^, to return 
to the most famous of the early kings, Cormac Mac Art, 
in whose reign the Feni flourished. The Feni are 
strange and shadowy figures, Ossianic ghosts, moving 
in dusky vales and along hillsides clothed with echoing 
woods and seamed with the many-coloured sides of 
roaring streams; or by the angry sea, where the scream- 
ing sea-bird wings his flight towards the dark rolling 
heavens, where the awful faces of other times look out 
from the clouds, and the dread deities keep their cloudy 
halls, and the nightly fires burn. It is a land of mists 
and rains, through which the figures of the heroes loom 
gigantic. They are the kings of shaggy boars, the 



l6 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

dwellers on battle's wing. They joy in the chase with 
their grey, rough-eared dogs about them. They rush 
against each other in war like the murmur of many 
waters, clashing their iron shields and shouting their 
surly songs; they remember the deeds of the days of 
old, and deaths wander like shadows over their fiery 
souls. Shadowy Death floats over the hosts, and re- 
joices at the frequent victims. When a hero falls, his 
soul goes forth to his fathers in their stormy isle, where 
they pursue boars of mist along the skirts of winds. 
Women, white-bosomed and beautiful, move like the 
music of songs through these antique tales, loving and 
beloved by heroes and kings of heroes. 

Many of the stories have for their hero Finn, the son 
of Coul, the Fingal of the Scottish Ossian. Around him 
are his Feni, who stand in the same relation to him 
that the twelve peers do to Charlemagne, or the Knights 
of the Round Table to Arthur, Oisin, the sweet singer; 
Oscar, his glorious son, the Roland of the Feni; Der- 
mat, of whom it might be said, as of Malory's Launce- 
lot, that he was 'the truest lover of a sinful man that 
ever loved woman ; ' Dering, the beloved of Finn, and 
Kylta, the leader of the Clan Ronan; Conan, the comic 
glutton, of craven spirit and bitter tongue, a more gro- 
tesque Thersites; Fergus Finnvel, the warrior poet, re- 
minding one of the Fiddler Knight in the ' Niebelungen 
Lied; ' Ligna, the swift-footed; Gaul, thel eader of the 
Clan Morna, whose enmity to the Clan Baskin made 
the battle of Gawra the Roncesvalles of the Feni. 
These are all heroes, going through all dangers, ever 
ready to do and to suffer bravely, battling with all the 
powers of darkness, loyal to each other, tender and 
courteous with women, gallant and goodly men, models 
of an early chivalry. Nor are Finn's famous dogs to 
be forgotten — Brann and Skolan, the companions of all 
his huntings and all his dangers. 

Finn himself is a marvellous figure. In his youth he, 
like Theseus, destroyed all sorts of fearful monsters. 
He had also the privilege on occasion of knowing the 
future. His hair was grey through enchantment long 
before old age had clawed him in its clutch. Two fair 



THE LEGENDS. 1^ 

sisters had loved him, and one of them said to the other 
that she could never love a man with grey hair. Then 
the other sister, despairing of winning Finn herself, 
lured him into an enchanted pool, which turned him 
into a withered old man. The angry Feni forced her 
to restore to their leader his youth, but his hair re- 
mained grey always. 

The people of Lochlann, in the north of Europe, in- 
vaded Ireland with a mighty fleet, but were wholly 
routed by the Feni under Finn, in a battle in which 
Oscar, the son of Oisin, greatly distinguished himself. 
The enemy were routed with great slaughter, their king 
was slain, and his young son, Midac was taken pris- 
oner. Finn brought up Midac in the ranks of the 
Feni, and treated him like a comrade; but Midac was 
always meditating revenge. At last, after fourteen 
years, Midac induced Sinsar of Greece and the Three 
Kings of the Torrent, to come secretly to Ireland with 
a mighty host, and they waited in a palace in an island 
of the Shannon, below where Limerick now is. Then 
Midac lured Finn, and many of the bravest of the 
Feni, who were on a hunting excursion, into a dwelling 
of his, the Palace of the Quicken Trees, as the mountain- 
ashes were called. The palace was enchanted, and 
once in it the heroes found themselves unable to get 
out, or even to move. So they set themselves to sing, 
in slow union, the Dord-Fian, the war-song of their 
race, while waiting death. But the party of Feni whom 
Finn had left behind him when he went to the Palace 
of the Quicken Trees began to grow anxious, and 
Fiona, Finn's son, and Innsa, his foster-brother, set 
out to look for them. When the pair came near the 
Palace of the Quicken Trees they heard the strains of 
the Dord-Fian; so they came close, and Finn heard 
them, and calling out, told them how he and his com- 
panions were trapped and waiting death, and that noth- 
ing could free them from enchantment but the blood 
of the Three Kings of the Torrent. Luckily for Finn, 
the only way to get to the Palace of the Quicken Trees 
from the palace of the island where Midac and the 
foreigners were lay over a narrow ford, where one man 



1 8 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

might well keep a thousand at stand. This ford Ficna 
and Innsa defended against desperate odds for long 
enough. Innsa was first slain, and Ficna is engaged in 
a desperate struggle with Midac, when Dermat appears 
on the scene. The Feni who were at the hill were 
growing impatient for the return- of Ficna and Innsa, 
so Oisin sent Dermat and Fatha to look for them. As 
they approached the Palace of the Quicken Trees they 
heard the noise of fighting at the ford. Then they ran 
like the wind to the hill-brow over the river, and look- 
ing across in the dim moonlight, saw the whole ford 
heaped with the bodies of the slain, and Ficna and Mil- 
dac fighting to the death. Dermat hurled his spear 
and pierced Midac, who struck Ficna dead, and fell 
dead himself. Then Dermat and Fatha defended the 
ford against reinforcements of foreigners, and Dermat 
soon killed the Three Kings of the Torrent, and undid 
the spell that held Finn and his friends. Then all the 
Feni came together, and the foreigners were routed 
with great slaughter; the King of Greece and his son 
were both slain, and the remnant of the enemy fled to 
their ships in confusion and sailed away. 

The friendship of Dermat and Finn was unfortunately 
broken for a woman's sake. Finn sought the daughter 
of Cormac Mac Art, the beautiful Grania, in marriage, 
but the beautiful Grania had long loved the fair-faced 
Dermat, in secret. When she saw herself about to be 
wedded to Finn, no longer a young man, she told her 
love to Dermat, and besought him to carry her away 
from Finn. At first, Dermat, loyal to his king, refused, 
though he was indeed deeply in love with the beautiful 
Grania, but Grania placed him under 'gesa,' a kind of 
mysterious command which heroes were supposed never 
to disobey, to marry her and carry her off. Dermat, 
in despair, consulted with his bravest comrades, with 
Kylta, and Oscar, and Dering, and Oisin himself, and 
all agreed that Finn would never forgive him, but that 
he was bound to go with Grania and take the risk. So 
go he did, and fled with her far from the court of King 
Cormac. But great indeed was the wrath, of Finn, and 
for long after he pursued Dermat and Grania from 



THE LEGENDS. 19 

place to place, always seeking to have Dermat killed, 
and always failing, owing to the skill of Dermat. All 
the sympathy of the Feni went with Dermat, and not 
with Finn. Very beautifully the old story celebrates 
the love of Dermat and Grania,"and the gallant deeds 
Dermat did for her sake. At last, weary of the pursuit, 
Finn consented to pardon Dermat, but in his heart he 
always cherished hatred against him, and when Dermat 
was wounded to death by a boar, Finn refused him the 
drink of water which from his hand would prove a cure. 
So Dermat died, to the great sorrow and anger of all 
the Feni. The story is one of the most beautiful, as it 
is the saddest, of the old Irish legends. 

Oisin, the last of the Feni, is said to have outlived all 
his companions by many centuries, and to have told of 
them and their deeds to St. Patrick. He had married 
a beautiful girl, who came to wed him from a country 
across the sea, called Tirnanoge, and there he dwelt, as 
he thought, for three, but as it proved, for three hun- 
dred, years. At the end of that time there came on 
him a great longing to see Erin again, and after much 
entreaty his fair wife allowed him to return, on the one 
condition that he never dismounted from a white steed 
which she gave him. When he got to Ireland he found 
that the Feni had long passed away, and that only the 
distant fame of them lingered in men's minds. Of 
course he dismounts from the horse — how many fairy 
tales would have ended happily if their heroes had only 
done as they were told! — and the horse straightway 
flies away, and then the curse of his old age comes 
upon Oisin, who falls to the ground an old withered, 
blind man, doomed never again to go back to Tirnan- 
oge and his fair wife and his immortal youth. St. Pat- 
rick was now in Ireland, and often spoke with Oisin, 
who never tired of telling of the heroes of his youth, 
and wondering that death could ever have laid hands 
upon their bright beauty. Bitterly he complained of 
the sound of the Christian bell and. the hymns of the 
Christian clerics, which had enchanted and destroyed 
the Feni. 'There is no joy in your strait cells,' Oisin 
wails. * There are no women among you, no cheerful 



20 Aisr oVTimE of irish history. 

music; ' and he laments for the joys of his youth, the 
songs of the blackbirds, the sound of the wind, the cry 
of the hounds let loose, the wash of water against the 
sides of ships, and the clash of arms, and the sweet 
voices of his youth's compeers. 



CHRIS TIANIT F. 21 



CHAPTER II. 

CHRISTIANITY. 



The authorities for all this wonderful fanciful legend, 
for all this pompous record of visionary kings and he- 
roes, are to be found in the ancient Irish manuscripts, 
in the Ossianic songs, in the annals of Tighernach, of 
Ulster, of Inis Mac Nerinn, of Innisfallen, and of Boyle, 
in the 'Chronicum Scotorum,' the books of Leinster 
and of Ballymote, the Yellow Book of Lecain, and the 
famous annals of the Four Masters, which Michael 
O'Clerigh, the poor friar of the Order of St. Francis, 
compiled for the glory of God and the honour of Ire- 
land. They are interpreted and made accessible to us 
by scholars and writers like O'Curry, and Ferguson, 
and Mr. P. W. Joyce, and Mr. Standish O'Grady. These 
and others have translated enough to show that the 
Irish manuscripts enclose a store of romantic records 
and heroic tales that will bear comparison well with the 
legends and the folk lore of any other country. There 
is yet much to do in the way of translating and popu- 
larizing these old Irish legends, and it may well be 
hoped and believed that Irish scholarship will prove it- 
self equal to the task. But these antique tales are not 
history. We cannot even say whether they have an his- 
torical basis. It matters very little. They are beauti- 
ful legends, in any case, and, like the tale of the Tro- 
jan War, and the records of the Seven Kings of Rome, 
they may be believed or not, according to the spirit of 
their student. It is more probable than not that they 
have a foundation of truth. Recent discoveries in the 
Troad have given an historical position to the siege of 
Troy; and the Irish chronicles have no worse claim to 
respect, as historic documents, than the rhapsodies of 
the Homeric singer. But modern historians prefer to 
leave the Tuatha de Danann and the Milesians undis- 



22 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

turbed in their shadowy kingdom, and content them- 
selves with suggesting that Ireland was at first inhabited 
by a Turanian race, and that there were Celtic and Teu- 
tonic immigrations. 

The social organization of pre-Christian Ireland shows 
many remarkable signs of civilization, especially in its 
treament of women, who were invested with a respect 
and dignity not common in the early history of races. 
In the legends, women receive always from men a ten- 
der and gracious submission that rivals the chivalry of 
the Arthurian romances; and there is every reason to 
believe that this was not confined to legend. The mar- 
ried woman was regarded as the equal of her husband 
no less than if she had lived in Rome, and repeated on 
her wedding-day the famous formula, ' Ubi tu Caius 
ego Caia.' The religion seems to have been a form of 
sun-worship, regulated by Druids, and not, it is said — 
though this is strongly contested — unaccompanied with 
human sacrifices. The people were divided into septs, 
composed of families bearing the name of their founder. 
The headman of each family served the chief of the 
sept, and each septal king in his turn recognised the 
authority of the Ard-Righ, or chief king. All chieftain- 
ships, and the offices of Druid and of Brehon, or law- 
giver, were elective. During the life of each chief, his 
successor, called the 'Tanist,' was chosen from the same 
family. Land was held by each sept in common, with- 
out any feudal condition, and primogeniture was un- 
known. Legitimate or illegitimate sons were partners 
with their father, and after his death took equal shares 
of his holding. The Brehon criminal laws punished al- 
most every offence by .more or less heavy fines. Agri- 
culture was in its infancy. Wealth lay in cattle, pigs, 
sheep, and horses. Ore and slaves were exported to 
the Mediterranean countries from the earliest times. 
The people dwelt in wattled houses, and their palaces 
were probably only of painted wood built on dyked and 
palisaded hills; but they could build strong fortresses 
and great sepulchral chambers, and raise vast cromlechs 
over their warrior dead. Whether the round towers 
which are still the wonder of many parts of Ireland 



CHRISTIANITY. 23 

were built by them or by the early Christians, and for 
what purpose, is still a subject of fierce controversy 
among archaeologists. Diodorus Siculus would seem 
to refer to them in a passage in which he speaks of an 
island of the size of Sicily, in the ocean over against 
Gaul, to the north, whose people were said to have a 
great affection for the Greeks from old times, and to 
build curious temples of round form. Whether they 
built the round towers or no, the early Irish were skilled 
in the working of gold ornaments, and in the manufac- 
ture of primitive weapons. . They seem to have known 
the art of writing early, and to have had a strange al- 
phabet of their own, called Ogham, from a shadowy 
King Oghma, who was supposed to have invented it. 
It was written by cutting notches in wood and stone, 
and there has been no small discussion over the read- 
ing of it. 

Authentic history begins with St. Patrick. Patrick 
had been carried as a slave from Gaul to Erin in his 
youth. He escaped to Rome and rose high in the 
Christian Church. But his heart was stirred with pity 
for his land of bondage, and about 432 he returned to 
Ireland, inspired by the hope of converting the country. 
He was not the first. Palladius had tried to convert 
Pagan lerne already, but where Palladius failed, Pat- 
rick succeeded; and the complete conversion of Ireland 
is one of the most splendid triumphs of the early Church. 
Wherever the saint went, conviction and conversion 
followed. He had dreamed a strange dream while in 
Rome, in which an angel appeared to him, bearing a 
scroll, with the superscription, ' The voice of the Irish.' 
The voice of the Irish had called him, and the ears of 
the Irish were ready to accept his teaching: king after 
king, chieftain after chieftain, abandoned the worship 
of their ancient gods to become the servants of Christ. 
For more than sixty years Patrick wrestled with the 
old gods in Ireland and overthrew them. He had found 
Ireland Pagan, but when he died and gave 

' His body to that pleasant country's earth, 
And his pure soul unto his captain Christ, 
Under whose colours he had fought so long.' 



24 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

the spirit of Christianity was over the island, and the 
power of the old gods was gone for ever. He was 
buried in Saul, in the county of Down, but his spirit 
lived in the souls of his followers. Long after Patrick 
had been laid to rest, his disciples carried the cross of 
Christ to the gaunt Scottish Highlands, the lonely Ger- 
man pine-forests, the savage Gaulish settlements, to 
Britain, and the wild islands of the Northern Seas. 
The Irish monks wandered into the waste places of Ire- 
land, and noble monasteries — the homes of religion 
and of learning — sprang up wherever they set their 
feet. The fathers of the Irish Church were listened 
to with reverence in the court of Charlemagne and in 
the Roman basilicas; and foreign ecclesiastics eagerly 
visited the homes of these men — the monasteries fa- 
mous for their learning, their libraries, and their secure 
peace. 

The island of the Sun-god had become the island of 
saints. To Ireland belong St. Columban, the reformer 
of the Gauls; St. Columbkill, the ' Dove of the Cell,' 
whose name has made lona holy ground; St. Foelan; 
St. Killian, the apostle of Franconia; St. Aidan; St. 
Gall, the converter of Helvetia; and St. Boniface. One 
hundred and fifty-five Irish saints are venerated in the 
churches of Germany, forty-five in Gaul, thirty in Bel- 
gium, thirteen in Italy, and eight in Scandinavia. For 
a long time all Christendom looked upon Ireland as 
the favourite home of religion and of wisdom. Mon- 
talembert, in his great history of ' The Monks of the 
West,' has given a glowing account of the civilization 
and the culture of the Irish monasteries. There the 
arts were practised — music, architecture, and the work- 
ing of metals. There the languages of Greece and 
Rome were studied with the passionate zeal which after- 
wards distinguished the Humanistic scholars of the re- 
vival of learning. The Irish monastic scholars carried 
their love for Greek so far that they even wrote the 
Latin of the Church books in the beloved Hellenic 
characters — and as we read we are reminded again of the 
old tradition of Greek descent — while, curiously enough, 
one of the oldest manusc'ipts of Horace in existence, 



CHRIS TIA NIT Y. 2$ 

that in the library of Berne, is written in Celtic charac- 
ters, with notes and commentaries in the Irish lan- 
guage. It is worthy of remark that Montalembert 
says, that of all nations the Anglo-Saxons derived most 
profit from the teaching of the Irish schools, and that 
Alfred of England received his education in an Irish 
University. 

With the lapse of time, however, and the disorders 
that came over the country during the struggles with 
the Danes, the organization of the Church suffered 
severely. In the twelfth century the irregularities that 
had crept into the Irish Church were brought before 
the notice of the Roman court. A synod, held at Kells, 
A.D. 1 152, under the Papal Legate Paparo, formally in- 
corporated the Irish Church into the ecclesiastical system 
of Rome. The Metropolitan Sees of Armagh, Cashel, 
Dublin, and Tuam, were created, with their Suffragan 
Sees, under the Primacy of the Archbishop of Armagh. 

Towards the end of the eighth century the Danes 
made their first descent upon Irelend, and for a time 
established themselves in the country, expending their 
fiercest fury upon the Church of the West, and driving 
the Irish scholars to carry their culture and their phi- 
losophy to the great cities of the European Continent. 
The Irish chiefs, divided amongst themselves, were un- 
able to oppose a common front to the enemy, and for 
more than a century the sea-kings held Ireland in sub- 
jection. At length a man arose who was more than a 
match for the sea-kings. Brian Boroimhe, brother of 
the King of Munster, raised an army against the Danes 
in 968, thoroughly defeated them, and reduced them to 
the condition of quiet dwellers in the seaport towns. 
But the master-spirit that the troublous time had con- 
jured up was not content to remain the conqueror of 
the Danes alone. He was determined to become the 
sovereign of all Ireland. It was sheer usurpation, and 
many of the Irish chiefs opposed Brian; but he soon 
overcome their resistance, and in looi he was acknowl- 
edged as King of all Ireland. He made a just and wise 
king, and for twelve years reigned in triumph and in 
peace. Then the Danes in Ireland began to pluck up 



26 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

heart again. They sent for help to their kinsmen over 
sea, and the Vikings came across the Swan's Bath with 
a mighty fleet, and made war upon Brian. Brian was 
an old man now, but as fierce and brave and skilful as 
ever. He raised up all his power to meet the Danes, 
and completely defeated them after a bloody struggle at 
Clontarf, on Good Friday, 1014. Their bravest chiefs 
were slain, and their spirits sent to the Hall of Odin to 
drink ale with the goddesses of death, while all the 
hawks of heaven mourned for them. But the victorious 
Irish had to bewail their king, who, owing to the negli- 
gence of his guards, was killed in his tent towards the 
end of the fight by the Danish leader. This great de- 
feat of the Danes put an end to any further dreams of a 
Danish invasion of Ireland, though it did not by any 
means destroy the influence that the Danes had already 
acquired in the island. They still held their own in the 
great seaport towns, and carried on fierce feuds with 
the native tribes, and in the slow processes of time be- 
came absorbed into and united with them. The death 
of Brian had a disastrous effect upon the condition of 
Ireland. The provinces that he had subjugated reas- 
serted their independence; but his usurpation had shat- 
tered the supremacy of the old royal race, and the his- 
tory of Ireland until the middle of the twelfth century 
is merely a melancholy succession of civil wars and 
struggles for the crown, upon which it would be alike 
painful and profitless to dwell. 



THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 2/ 



CHAPTER III. 

THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 

Ireland was now divided into four confederations of 
tribes. The O'Neils held Ulidia, which is now called 
Ulster; the O'Connors Conacia, or Connaught; the 
O'Briens and the M'Carthys Mononia, or Munster; and 
the Macmurroughs Lagenia, or Leinster — all under 
the paramount but often-disputed rule of a branch of 
the Ulster O'Neils. The royal demesne of Meath, the 
appanage of the Ulster family, which included West- 
meath, Longford, and a part of King's County, was 
sometimes counted a fifth kingdom. 

In the wild north, O'Neil, O'Donnel, O'Kane, O'Hara, 
O'Sheel, O'Carrol, were mighty names. On the north- 
ernmost peninsula, where the Atlantic runs into Lough 
Foyle and Lough Swilly, O'Dogherty reigned supreme. 
In Connaught, O'Rourke, O'Reilly, O'Kelly, O'Flaherty, 
O'Malley, O'Dowd, were lords. In Meath and Leinster, 
MacGeogeghan, O'Farrell, O'Connor, O'Moore, O'Bren- 
nan, Macmurrough ruled. In Munster, by the western 
shore, MacCarthy More held sway. MacCarthy Reagh 
swayed the south, by the pleasant waters of Cork Bay. 
O'Sullivan Beare was lord of the fair promontory be- 
tween Bantry Bay and Kenmare River. O'Mahony 
reigned by roaring Water Bay. O'Donohue was chief- 
tain by the haunted Killarney Lakes. McMahon ruled 
north of the Shannon. O'Logiin looked on Galway 
Bay. 

All Ireland, with the exception of a few seaport towns 
where the Danes had settled, was in the hands of Irish 
chiefs of old descent and famous lineage. They quar- 
relled amongst themselves as readily and as fiercely as 
if they had been the heads of so many Greek states. 
The Danes had been their Persians; their Romans were 
now to come. 



28 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

The whole story of Irish subjugation and its seven 
centuries of successive struggles begins with the carry- 
ing off of Devorgilla, wife of Tiernan O'Rorke, of Bref- 
ny, by a dissolute, brutal giant some sixty years old — 
Dermot Macmurrough, King of Leinster. We have a 
curious picture of him preserved in the writings of 
Giraldus Cambrensis, who knew him, and who was the 
first historian of the Irish invasion. ' Dermot was a 
man of tall stature and great body; a valiant and bold 
warrior in his nation. By constant halloaing and cry- 
ing out his voice had become hoarse. He chose to be 
feared rather than loved; oppressed his nobility greatly, 
but greatly supported and advanced the poor and weak. 
To his own kindred he was rough and grievous, and 
hateful to strangers; he would be against all men, and 
all men were against him.' Such was the man who 
found the fair wife of the Lord of Brefny a willing vic- 
tim. Alexander the Gi-eat was pleased to fancy that in 
ravaging the countries of the Great King he was still 
avenging the ancient quarrel for the rape of Helen. 
But Helen was not more fatal to Greeks and Easterns 
than Devorgilla, Erin's Helen, proved to the neighbour- 
ing islands that lie along the Irish Sea. Through ages 
of bloodshed and slaughter her country has indeed bled 
for her shame. There is a grim ironic mockery in the 
thought that two nations have been set for centuries in 
the bitterest hatred by the loves of a lustful savage and 
an unfaithful wife. One might well paraphrase the 
words of Shakespeare's Diomed in * Troilus and Cres- 
sida,' and say that 'for every false drop in her bawdy 
veins an English life hath sunk; for every scruple of 
her contaminated carrion weight an Irishman been 
slain.' The Lord of Brefny made war upon his be- 
trayer; Rory O'Connor, the last king of Ireland, 
espoused O'Rorke's cause, and Dermot fled the coun- 
try. He hastened to Aquitaine, where Henry II. was 
then staying, and did him homage. Pope Adrian IV., 
known to England as Nicholas Breakspere, the only 
Englishman who ever sat in the seat of St. Peter, had 
given Henry II. a Bull of Authority over Ireland some 
years before, authority which Henry had not yet seen 



THB NORMAN CONQUEST. 29 

fit to exercise. Dermot's quarrel was Henry's oppor- 
tunity. He allowed the treacherous fugitive to shark 
up a list of lawless resolutes from among the Norman 
barons in Wales, headed by Richard de Clare, Earl 
Pembroke, called ' Strongbow.' Ireland was invaded, 
Wexford seized, Waterford taken and sacked, and Eva, 
Dermot's daughter, married to Strongbow, as a further 
bond between the Lord of Leinster and the Norman 
adventurer. The superiority of the Norman arms and 
armour impressed the Irish chiefs and soldiery as the 
iron of Charlemagne's legions impressed the Huns. 
The Normans made a brave show, lapped in steel, with 
their pointed helms and shields, their surcoats gleam- 
ing with the or and aj-ge?it, gules and azure of their 
heraldic bearings, their powerful weapons, and their 
huge war-horses. Beneath their floating pennons came 
their well-trained, well-armed soldiers, skilled to shoot 
with long-bow and cross-bow, well supplied with all 
the implements fit for the taking of cities that Roman 
ingenuity had devised and Norman craft perfected. 
The Irish galloglasses and kerns opposed to them, if 
not wholly unfamiliar with the use of mail, seldom in- 
deed used it, and fought their fiercest, protected alone 
by the shirts of saffron-dye in which they delighted, 
while their weapons were in eveiy respect inferior to 
those of the invaders. Naturally, the Normans were at 
first triumphant everywhere. They swarmed over the 
country, pushing their strange names and strange ways 
into the homes of the time-honoured septs. De Burgo 
in Connaught, FitzMaurice and FitzGerald in Kerry, 
in the land of the MacCarthy More; De Cogan, Fitz- 
Stephen, and De la Poer along the southern coast; De 
Lacy in the north; all the cloud of De Grandisons, and 
De Montmorencies, and De Courcies, and Mandevilles, 
and FitzEustaces, who settled along the eastern coasts, 
and pushed their way inland — these were to be the new 
masters of men whose hearts were given in allegiance 
to the lords of the O and of the Mac. 

Bat though the first flush of victory rested with the 
Normans, their hold over the country was for some 
time uncertain. Dermot, whose alliance was of great 



30 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

importance to the invaders, died suddenly a loathsome 
death. , Henry seemed little inclined to lend his 
strength to the bold barons, whose successes made him 
jealous for his own authority over the island. He even 
ordered Strongbow to leave Ireland, a command that 
it was difhcult to obey, for the Irish had plucked up 
heart of grace to turn upon their invaders, and were 
harassing them very effectually. They were reinforced, 
too, by their old enemies the Danes, whose seaport set- 
tlements the Normans had seized upon with scant 
courtesy, and between the two the adventurers were in 
a bad way. Strongbow took the opportunity of a 
momentary triumph of the Norman arms to return to 
England and make his peace with his jealous monarch, 
Henry pardoned him his delayed submission, and im- 
mediately secured the Norman grasp on Ireland by 
leafling a large army across the Irish Sea on a 'Veni, 
vidi, vici,' visit, as Sir John Davies called it, writing of 
it some centuries later. 

The armament overawed many of the Irish chieftains, 
who seem to have thought resistance to the master of 
such legions vain, and most of the Munster chieftains 
came in and swore allegiance. Rory O'Connor held 
out against the king; so did the Ulster chiefs; but 
Henry, content with what he gained, for the time let 
them alone, and proceeded to organize his new terri- 
tory. He divided it into counties, and set up the royal 
law courts of Bench, Pleas, and Exchequer in Dublin, 
to afford the Norman settlers the privileges of English 
law. The natives were allowed to keep to their old 
Brehon laws, which dated from the earliest times, and 
were as unlike the English processes of jurisprudence 
as the Irish land system was unlike the feudal system 
now introduced, 

Henry's stay in Ireland was abruptly cut short by a 
summons to appear before the Papal Legates in Nor- 
mandy who were inquiring into the murder of Beckett. 
He left the island never to come back to it again. But 
he had done much to Normanize the country by mak- 
ing large and wholly illegal grants of Septal territory 
to his followers, leaving "it to them to win and keep 



T}}E GORMAN CON-QUEST. $1 

these gifts as best they could. With the sword the 
barons advanced their claims, and with the sword the 
Irish chieftains met them. 

The story of Ireland from the first to the second 
Richard is one monotonous record of constant warfare 
between the Irish and the Normans, and of incessant 
strife between the rival Irish houses. The barons built 
great castles, and lived in them a life of rough self- 
reliance, very like that of the robber lords of the Rhine 
provinces in later centuries. Many of these domains 
were counties palatinate, that is to say their lords had 
the privilege of making their own laws with very little 
regard to the jurisdiction of the crown, and with abso- 
lute power of life and death. They ruled the tenants 
accordingly, with a queer mixture of Brehon and Nor- 
man law, after their own fashion. In the Norman 
towns, which were gradually established in the country 
under the protection of some one or other of the great 
barons, the language for a long time was only Norman 
French, and the customs as well. It was as if some 
town of pleasant Normandy had been taken bodily up 
and transported to Ireland, with its well-wardered 
ramparts, on which the citizens' wives and daughters 
walked of quiet evenings in times of peace, its busy 
crowded streets, thronged with citizens of all trades 
and crafts, marching sometimes gaily in their guilds, 
and ready at all times to drop awl or hammer, net or 
knife, and rush to arms to attack or to repel the Irish 
enemy. For outside the ramparts of these Norman 
towns on Irish earth, outside the last bastion of the 
baron's stronghold, lay the Irish, a separate and a hos- 
tile nation, ever attacked, and ever ready to attack. 
The return of the swallow was not surer in summer 
than the renewed outbreak of strife between Norman 
baron and Irish chief when once the winter had faded 
into spring. The baron took to the road like a last 
century highwayman: he swooped down upon the fields 
of the Irish; he seized upon the stores that they had 
placed in their churches and churchyards, as was their 
custom before they took to building castles themselves. 
The Irish retaliated whenever and wherever they could. 



32 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

For long there was no sort of alliance between them. 
Only those who belonged to the ' five bloods ' of the 
O'Neils of Ulster, the O'Connors of Connauglit, the 
O'Briens of Thomond, the O'Melachlins of Meath, and 
the Macmurroughs of Leinster, could have audience in 
an English court. The killing of an Irishman or the 
violation of an Irishwoman by an English colonist was 
no crime. 

Yet, with the slow advance of time the Norman sett- 
lers began to succumb to Irish influences. The hostil- 
ities lessened, the hatreds waned. The Norman barons 
began to find peace better than war, and love fairer 
than feud. They took to themselves wives from among 
the daughters of the Irish chiefs. By degrees they 
abandoned their knightly trappings, their Norman 
names, and their foreign speech, to adopt instead the 
Irish dress, names, language, and law. A Burke be- 
came a M'William, a Fitzmaurice became a M'Morice, 
and a Bermingham became a M'Yoris. The trans- 
formed barons aspired to be independent Irish chief- 
tains like their new allies; in time they came to be 
known as 'more Irish than the Irish themselves.' 

The English Government witnessed with jealous an- 
ger this curious process of assimilation, and strove at 
intervals to stay its course. A statute passed in 1295 
prohibited in vain the adoption of the Irish garb by 
Norman settlers. The English had not the power to 
enforce such restrictive laws; they had not even the 
strength to protect such of the settlers as were willing 
to abide by their own Norman ways and words. These 
were forced in self-defence into association and alliance 
with the Irish chiefs, who were gradually regaining 
their control over the country. 

After the English defeat at Bannockburn, the Irish 
chiefs at once rose in revolt against England. Edward 
Bruce, brother of the victorious Scottish king, came 
over to Ireland in 1315, and was heartily welcomed, not 
by the native Irish alone, but by many of the Anglo- 
Irish nobles. Edward Bruce was crowned as king at 
Dundalk, and for a short time the insurrection carried 
all before it, and the Anglo-Irish lords who had not 



THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 33 

joined the rebellion were put to great straits to defend 
themselves. The English Government made a desper- 
ate effort, raised a large army under Sir John de Ber- 
mingham, which completely defeated the allied Scotch, 
Irish, and Anglo-Irish forces in a battle near Dundalk, 
in which Edward Bruce himself was killed. But the 
victory was dearly bought. The loyal Anglo-Irish had 
learned to their cost that they could not count for safety 
on the protection of the home Government, and that 
security was more easily attained by amalgamation with 
the Irish. The Irishizing process went on more vig- 
orously than ever. The conversion of Norman barons 
into Irish chiefs with Irish names waxed day by day. 
The condition of the English settlers who remained un- 
changed in the midst of such changes became desperate 
indeed. 

Something had to be done. In 1356 it was proclaimed 
that no one born in Ireland should hold any of the 
king's towns or castles. This proved ineffectual, and 
sterner measures were resorted to eleven years later, at 
the Parliament held in Kilkenny, in 1367. The Nor- 
man Parliament in Ireland was originally a council of 
the barons, prelates, and the 'faithful;' but it had grown 
with time into greater importance. The Upper House 
consisted of lay peers, abbots, priors, and bishops; the 
Lower House of the knights of the shires and burgesses. 
Many of the lay peers claimed and received exemption 
from attendance, and the abbots, priors, and bishops 
generally sent their proctors in their places, till the 
practice grew up of summoning two proctors from each 
diocese, who sat with the knights and burgesses in the 
Lower House, and claimed to be members of the legis- 
lature. Most of the shires were in the hands of the 
Irish, and returned no members. Burgesses were sum- 
moned from a few towns, many not being elected by 
the freemen of the city, but receiving the royal writ 
personally, by name. It met at irregular intervals, 
sometimes at Dublin, sometimes at Kilkenny, and 
sometimes at Drogheda, at the summons of the king's 
lieutenant, or his deputy. 

The Parliament of Kilkenny inflicted heavy penalties 



34 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

on all English who adopted Irish names, speech, or cus- 
toms. The Norman who dared to marry an Irish wife 
was to be half-hanged, shamefully mutilated, disem- 
bowelled alive, and forfeit his estate. The fostering of 
Norman with Irish children, and the maintenance of 
Irish bards, were alike sternly prohibited. But at the 
time the English Government had not the power to en- 
force these statutes, which only served to further exas- 
perate the Irish and the Anglo-Irish. 

Richard II. was in Ireland with a large army, deter- 
mined to reduce the country to obedience, when the 
news of Bolingbroke's landing at Ravenspurgh called 
him back to his death. The struggles of the Houses 
of the White and the Red Rose occupied Ireland as 
well as England. Anglo-Irish lords crossed the sea to 
fight for York and Lancaster by the side of the King- 
maker or Clifford of Cumberland. In Ireland the two 
greatest houses took opposite sides. The Butlers of 
East Munster, the Lords of Ormonde, who swayed Tip- 
perary, and Kilkenny, plucked a sanguine rose with 
young Somerset; while the Geraldines of both the Des- 
mond and Kildare branches loved no colours, and 
cropped a pale and angry rose with Plantagenet. 

The story of the house of Geraldine is one of the 
most romantic in all Irish history. The Geraldines 
were descended from the two brothers Maurice and 
William Fitzgerald, who came to Ireland at the heels 
of Strongbow. Through varying fortunes — at one time 
the whole house was nearly exterminated by MacCarthy 
More — they had risen to a proud position of rule in 
Ireland. They owned all the broad lands from Maynooth 
to Lixnaw; their followers swarmed everywhere, bear- 
ing a ' G' on their breast in token that they owed their 
hearts to the Geraldines. 

Moore has made famous the story of Thomas, the 
sixth earl, who, 'by the Fial's wave benighted, no star 
in the sky,' was lighted by love to the door of a re- 
tainer's cottage. The poet fancies that as the chieftain 
crossed the threshold, some ominous voice whispered 
that there was ruin before him. If he loved he was lost. 
Love and ruin did indeed await the Geraldine across 



THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 35 

the threshold. The retainer had a beautiful daughter, 
and 'love came and brought sorrow too soon in his 
train' for Thomas of Kildare. He married the peasant 
girl, and was outlawed by his stately family, and went 
to France with his humble love, and died, a poor but a 
happy man, at Rouen, many years later. 

After Boswprth Battle had placed Henry VII. on the 
throne of Richard of Gloucester, the new king was too 
busy with his new kingdom to give much thought to 
Ireland. The English colony was in a bad way there. 
It was reduced to the county of Dublin and parts of 
Meath, Louth, and Kildare. The greater part of the 
island was entirely in the hands of Irish chieftains, who 
exacted tribute from the English, and scornfully set at 
naught the continued and meaningless renewals of the 
statutes of Kilkenny. Henry at first left Ireland alone. 
He was ever content to leave the Geraldine control of 
the country unquestioned, although the Geraldines had 
been so defiantly Yorkist, and though not a few fol- 
lowers of the house had painted their own white roses 
red with their own blood on many an English field. 
They were Yorkist still. When Lambert Simnel came 
over to Ireland, pretending to be the son of false, fleet- 
ing, perjured Clarence, the Geraldines rallied round 
him with warm support and sympathy. When this im- 
age of a king was swept from the throne to the kitchen, 
Parkin Warbeck took his place, claimed to be the Duke 
of York whom Gloucester had murdered in the tower, 
and he, too, found Geraldine aid and maintenance. 
Henry had now learnt something of the strength of Irish 
disaffection in the hands of the Irish chiefs, and pre- 
pared to crush it out more subtly than by the sword. 
We have seen what the Irish Parliament was like: a 
poor thing enough in itself, but at worst containing the 
principles of a representative system. This system 
Henry resolved to destroy. 'Three centuries had passed 
since the Norman banners had first floated over the 
Irish fields, and in all that time no attempt had been 
made to force the English laws upon the Irish Septs, 
or to interfere with the self-government of the Nor- 
man settlers. Now, in 1494, Henry sent over Sir Edward 



36 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Poynings, as Lord Deputy, with an army at his back, 
to change altogether the relationship between the two 
islands. Poynings summoned a Parliament at Drog- 
heda, at which the famous measure known as Poynings's 
Act was passed. This Act established that all English 
laws should operate in Ireland, and that the consent of 
the Privy Council of England was necessary for all Acts 
of the Irish Parliament. These measures at once de- 
prived Ireland of all claim to independent government. 
Henceforward she was to be the helpless dependent of 
the conquering country. But the loss of liberty did not 
destroy the Irish desire for freedom; it rather gave it 
an additional incentive to action. 

Ireland being thus soldered close to England, Henry 
was content to leave the government of the country in 
the hands of its most powerful man. 'All Ireland,' men 
said, 'was not a match for the Earl of Kildare.' ' Then 
let the Earl of Kildare govern all Ireland,' said Henry 
VII., and gave the rule of Ireland into his hands. He 
had been the most potent spirit in Ireland under the 
old system; to confirm his power under the new seemed 
to the astute Henry the surest means of securing his 
allegiance and the quiet dependence of Ireland. 

His successor, the Eighth Henr}?-, looked on the Ger- 
aldine power with grave jealousy. The control of the 
island was practically in the hands of the Earls of Kil- 
dare and their followers, and was drifting day by day 
further from the control and supremacy of England. 
What use were statutes of Kilkenny and Poynings's Acts 
if the country was under the command of an Anglo- 
Irish house who defied the authority of England? His 
jealousy of the Geraldines was fostered by Wolsey, who 
was considerably under the influence of the House of 
Ormonde, the bitter enemies of the Geraldines. Gerald, 
the ninth earl, son of Henry VII.'s deputy, was sum- 
moned to England. He was at once thrown into the 
Tower, and false news of his execution was sent to 
Dublin, His son. Lord Thomas Fitzgerald, 'Silken 
Thomas,' as he was commonly called by his people, 
from the splendour of his dress, displayed no silken 
spirit. He raised at once a desperate revolt against the 



THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 37 

king, but his forces were shattered by the English ar 
tillery, brought thus into Irish warfare for the first 
time. He and his five uncles were compelled to sur- 
render. They were sent to London, to the Tower, 
where the Earl of Kildare had died of a broken heart, 
and they were all hanged at Tyburn. Only one of their 
kin, a boy of twelve, a son of the Earl of Kildare by his 
second wife, escaped from the slaughter of his race to 
Rome, to found again the fortunes of his house. * The 
dying Gracchus,' said Mirabeau, 'flung dust to heaven, 
and from that dust sprang Marius.' From the blood 
of the Geraldines arose the great house of Desmond and 
Tyrone, which at one time seemed likely to establish 
the independence of Ireland. 

Henry's next act was to confiscate the Church lands 
in Ireland as he had done in England. How this was 
done we may learn in the melancholy words of the Four 
Masters: 'They broke down the the. monasteries, and 
sold their roofs and bells from Arran of the Saints to 
the Iccian Sea. . . They burned the images, shrines, 
and relics. . . the staff of Jesus, which had been in the 
hand of St. Patrick.' A Parliamejit was summoned at 
Dublin, at which for the first time some Irish chief- 
tains were to be seen sitting by the English lords at the 
national assembly. These chiefs agreed to hold their 
land of the king by English law, to come to the king's 
courts for justice, to attend Parliament, to send their 
sons to be educated at the English court, and to re- 
nounce the authority of the Pope. The Parliament 
conferred on Henry and his successors the title of King 
instead of Lord Paramount of Ireland. 

Under Edward, the chiefs who dwelt in Leix, Offaly, 
Fercal, and Ely, in the central plain of Ireland, of 
whom the O'Moores and O'Connors were chief, showed 
signs of revolt. They were formidable and warlike, 
and Henry VIII. had thought it well worth his while to 
keep them quiet by subsidy. With the news of his 
death they may have thought that an opportunity of 
some kind had come; but whether they intended rebel- 
lion ornot, the Government acted on the assumption 
that they did, and crushed them before they had time 



38 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

to move, captured their chiefs, laid waste their settle- 
ments, and finally confiscated their lands, and planted 
them with English settlers. The dispossessed Irish 
drove the settlers out after nine years of ceaseless war- 
fare. Then the Government put forth its strength, shot 
down the obnoxious natives wherever they could get at 
them, hunted them as outlaws, and at last practically 
exterminated them. Mary was by this time on the 
throne. A part of Offaly, Fercal, and Ely was converted 
into King's County; Leix, another portion of Offaly, 
and Upper Ossory, became Queen's County. In the 
settlement of these two counties we may see the begin- 
nings of those plantation schemes, which were to be 
carried on, on so large a scale, by the succeeding Eng- 
lish rulers, whether Tudor, Stuart, or Puritan. 



ELIZABETH. 39 



CHAPTER IV. 

ELIZABETH. 

The Reformation begun under Henry VHI. was car- 
ried out with pitiless determination under Edward VI., 
and was met by the Catholics with unflinching opposi- 
tion. Under Mary there wa€ a period of respite, but 
the strife was renewed with greater fierceness in the 
succeeding reign. As authentic Irish history begins 
with St. Patrick, so with Elizabeth modern Irish history 
may be said to begin. The principles of the Reformation 
had only served to deepen the hostility, already deep 
enough, between the Irish chiefs and the English crown. 
It had also served to unite the Catholic Anglo-Irish 
with the Catholic native Irish as they had never been 
united before. The English Act of Uniformity had not 
yet been registered by a Parliament. Elizabeth, in 
January, 1560, summoned a carefully chosen and obedi- 
ent Parliament, which repealed the Catholic Acts passed 
by Mary, and passed ^the Act of Uniformity, which 
made the new liturgy compulsory. Many of the 
bishops accepted the situation; those who refused, and 
who were within Elizabeth's power, were deprived; 
those outside the pale and its power trusted in their 
isolation and defied the new measures. The seizures of 
Henry and Edward had impoverished the Irish Church, 
but the spirit of the Church was unbroken. On hill- 
sides and by hedges the mendicant friars still preached 
the faith of their fathers in their fathers' native tongue, 
and wherever they went they found a people eager to 
hear and to honour them, resolute to oppose the changes 
that came in the name of Henry, of Edward, and of 
Elizabeth from across the sea. 

At her accession, Elizabeth was too much occupied 
with foreign complications to pay much heed to Ireland. 
Trouble first began in a conflict between the feudal 



40 AN- OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

laws and the old Irish law of Tanistry. Con O'Neil, 
Earl of Tyrone, had taken his title from Henry VIII., 
subject to the English law of succession; but when Con 
died, the clan O'Neil, disregarding the English princi- 
ple of hereditary succession, chose Shane O'Neil, an 
illegitimate son of Con, and the hero of his Sept, to be 
The O'Neil. Shane O'Neil at once put himself for- 
ward as the champion of Irish libert)'-, the supporter of 
the Irish right to rule themselves in their own way and 
pay no heed to England. Under the pretence of govern- 
ing the country, Elizabeth overran it with a soldiery 
who, as even Mr. Froude acknowledges, lived almost 
universally on plunder, and were little better than ban- 
dits. The time was an appropriate one for a champion 
of Irish rights. Shane O'Neil boldly stood out as 
sovereign of Ulster, and pitted himself against Elizabeth, 
She tried to have him moved by assassination. When 
this failed she tried to temporise. Shane was invited 
to England, Avhere the courtly gentlemen who hovered 
about Elizabeth stared over their spreading ruffs in 
wonder at Shane the Proud and his wild followers in 
their saffron-stained shirts and rough cloaks, with great 
battleaxes in their hands. They sharpened their wits 
upon his haughty bearing, his scornful speech, and his 
strange garb. But his size and strength made great 
impression on the Queen, and for the moment an ami- 
cable arrangement seemed to be arrived at. For many 
years there had been a steady immigration of Scots 
from Argyleshire into Antrim, who had often served 
Shane O'Neil as mercenaries. These Scotch settlers 
seem to have been regarded with dislike by the Crown; 
at all events, it was part of the compact with Shane 
that he should reduce them, and reduce them he did, 
with no light or sparing hand. But the fierce King of 
Ulster was by far too powerful to please Elizabeth 
long. Her agents induced other tribes to rise against 
him. Shane fought bravely against his fate, but he 
was defeated, put to flight, and murdered by his ene- 
mies, the Scots of Antrim, in whose strongholds he 
madly sought refuge. His head was struck off, and 
sent to adorn the walls of Dublin Castle. His lands 



ELIZABETH. 41 

were declared forfeit, and his vassals vassals of the 
Crown. English soldiers of fortune were given grants 
from Shane's escheated territory, but when they at- 
tempted to settle they were killed by the O'Neils. 
Others came in their place, under Walter Devereux, 
Earl of Essex, and did their best to simplify the 
process of colonization by exterminating the O'Neils, 
men, women, and children, wherever they could be got 
at. • After two years of struggle, Essex was compelled 
to abandon his settlement. But other colonizers were 
not disheartened. Some West of England gentlemen, 
under Peter Carew, seized on Cork, Limerick, and 
Kerry, and sought to hold them by extirpating the ob- 
noxious natives. 

Against these English inroads the great Geraldine 
League was formed. In the reign of Mary, that boy of 
twelve whom Henry VIII. had not been able to include in 
the general doom of his house had been allowed to return 
to Ireland, and to resume his ancestral honours. Once 
more the Geraldines were a great and powerful family in 
Ireland. But their strength had again awakened the 
alarm of the English Government. The Earl of Des- 
mond and his brother had been summoned to England 
and cast into the Tower. Their cousin, James Fitz- 
maurice of Desmond, now began to unite the Geraldines 
against Carew and his companions, and fought them 
and those sent to help them for two years. They were 
of course defeated, not however so badly but that 
Elizabeth was willing not only to receive their submis- 
sion, but to release Desmond and his brother from the 
Tower and send them back to Ireland. James Fitz- 
maurice Fitzgerald went into voluntary exile, wander- 
ing from capital to capital of the Catholic Continental 
Powers, seeking aid and assistance for his cherished 
Geraldine League. The Geraldines and their companion 
chiefs got encouragement in Rome and pledges from 
Spain, and they rose again under the Earl of Desmond 
and Sir James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald. At first they 
had some successes. They had many wrongs to avenge. 
Sir Nicholas Maltby had just crushed out, with the most 
pitiless cruelty, a rising of the Bourkes of Connaught. 



4^ AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Sir Francis Crosby, the Queen's representative in Leix 
and Offaly, had conceived and executed the idea of pre- 
venting any further possible rising of the chiefs in those 
districts by summoning them and their kinsmen to a 
great banquet in the fort of Mullaghmast, and there 
massacring them all. Out of four hundred guests, only 
one man, a Lalor, escaped from that feast of blood. Of 
the clan O'Moore no less than one hundred and eighty 
chief men were slaughtered. One of the Moores had not 
come to that fatal banquet. Ruari Oge O'Moore, bet- 
ter known as ' Rory O'Moore,' devoted himself to aveng- 
ing his murdered kinsmen, and the cry of ' Remember 
Mullaghmast!' sounded dismally in the ears of the set- 
tlers of King's and Queen's Counties for many a long 
year after, whenever Rory O'Moore made one of his 
swoops upon them with that shout for his battle-cry. 
With such memories in their minds, the tribes rose in 
all directions to the Desmond call. Early in the rising 
Fitzmaurice was killed in a scuffle. This was a heavy 
blow to the rebels; so was a defeat of the Geraldines by 
Sir Nicholas Maltby at Monaster. Elizabeth sent over 
more troops to Ireland under the new Lord Deputy, Sir 
William Pelham, who had with him as ally Ormonde, 
the head of the house of Butler, hereditary foes of the 
Geraldines, and easily induced to act against them. 
Pelham and Ormonde cut their way over Munster, re- 
ducing the province by unexampled ferocity. Ormonde 
boasted that he had put to death nearly six thousand 
disaffected persons. Just at this moment some of the 
Chiefs of the Pale rose, and rose too late. They gained 
one victory over Lord Grey de Wilton in the pass of 
Glenraalure, where the troops were completely routed 
by the Chief of Glenmalure, Feach M'Hugh, whom the 
English called ' the Firebrand of the Mountains.' Grey 
immediately abandoned the Pale to the insurgents, and 
turned to Smerwick, where some eight hundred Spanish 
and Italian soldiers had just landed too late to be of any 
service to the rebellion, and had occupied the dismantled 
fort. It was at once blockaded by sea and by land. In 
Grey's army Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser 
both held commands. Smerwick, surrendered at discre- 



ELIZABETH. 43 

tion, and the prisoners were killed by Raleigh and his 
men in cold blood. Flushed by this success, Grey re- 
turned to the Pale and carried all before him. The Ger- 
aldines were disheartened, and were defeated wherever 
they made a stand. Lord Kildare was arrested on sus- 
picion of treason, and sent to London to die in the Tower. 
Martial law was proclaimed in Dublin, and everyone, 
gentle or simple, suspected of disaffection was promptly 
hanged. Munster was pacified by an unstinted use of 
sword and gallows. The Desmond held out for a time, 
but he was caught at last and killed in the Slievemish 
Mountains, and his head sent to London to adorn the 
Tower. Munster was so vigorously laid waste that Mr. 
Froude declares that 'the lowing of a cow or the sound 
of a ploughboy's whistle was not to be heard from Va- 
lentia to the Rock of Cashel.' 

Holinshed declares the traveller would not meet any 
man, woman, or child, saving in towns or cities, and 
would not see any beast; and Spenser gives a melan- 
choly picture of the misery of the inhabitants, ' as that 
any stony heart would rue the same.' They were driven 
by misery to eat dead bodies scraped out of the grave; 
and Sir William Pelhara proudly tells the queen how he 
has reduced the inhabitants to prefer being slaughtered 
to dying of starvation. Being thus pacified, Munster was 
now divided into seigniories of from 4,000 to 12,000 acres, 
to be held in fee of the crown at a quit rent of from 2d. 
to 3d. per acre, by such adventurers as cared to strug- 
gle with the dispossessed Irish. 

The next step was to confiscate the estates of the re- 
bellious chieftains. Sir John Perrot succeeded Lord 
Grey as deputy. He summoned a Parliament at which 
many of the Irish chiefs, persuaded, no doubt, by the 
strength of England's recent arguments, attended in 
English dress. The Parliament was perfectly manage- 
able. It attainted anyone whom the Lord Deputy 
wished attainted. The estates of Desmond and some 
hundred and forty of his followers came to the Crown. 

i'The land was then distributed at the cheapest rate in 
large tracts to English nobles and gentlemen adven 
turers, who were pledged to colonize it with English 



44 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

labourers and tradesmen. But of these labourers and 
tradesmen not many came ovei", and those who did soon 
returned, tired of struggling for their foothold with the 
dispossessed Irish. In default of other tenants, the new 
owners of the soil were practically forced to take on the 
natives as tenants at will, and thus the desired change 
of population was not effected. 

Perrot was a stern but not a merciless man, with a 
fierce temper, which made him many enemies among 
his own colleagues. He disliked the policy of Bingham 
in Connaught, and challenged him. He had a differ- 
rence of opinion with Sir Henry Bagnal, and thought 
he had settled it when he had knocked Bagnal down. 
Nor was he more popular with the Irish. He treacher- 
ously captured Hugh Roe, or Red Hugh O'Donnell, son 
of Hugh O'Donnell, Tyrconnel, and kept him in Dublin 
Castle as a hostage for his father's good behaviour, and 
thus made young Red Hugh a bitter and dangerous 
enemy to the Crown. In the end Perrot was recalled 
and Sir William Fitzwilliam sent in his stead. 

After six years of an exasperating rule, Fitzwilliam 
gave place in 1594 to Sir William Russell, who found 
the country hopelessly disorganized. Red Hugh had 
escaped from Dublin Castle to his Sept in Donegal, 
and his father had resigned the chieftainship to him. 
The dragoonings of Sir Richard Bingham had driven 
Connaught to desperation. The northern tribes were 
disturbed; some were inrebellion. Ulster, which had 
kept quiet all through the Desmond rebellion, was stirred 
by the spirit of sedition, and its great chief, Hugh O'Neil 
of Tyrone, was thought to be discontented and dan- 
gerous. 

Hugh O'Neil, the grandson of that Con O'Neil whom 
Henry VIII. had made Earl of Tyrone, had been brought 
up at the English court, and confirmed in the lordship 
of Tyrone by the English Government. In the brilliant 
court of Elizabeth the young Irish chief was distin- 
guished for his gifts of mind and body. When he came 
of age he was allowed to return to Ireland to his 
earldom. Once within his. own country he assumed 
his ancestral title of The O'Neil, and revived all the 



ELIZABETH. 45 

customs of independent Irish chieftains, For long 
enough he took no part in any plots or movements 
against the Crown; but many things, the ties of friend- 
ship and of love, combined to drive him into rebellion. 
He had been deeply angered by the imprisonment of 
his kinsman, Red Hugh, and when Red Hugh escaped, 
burning with a sense of his wrongs and a desire for re- 
venge, he brought all his influence to bear upon O'Neil 
to di'aw him into a confederation against the Govern- 
ment. Another and more romantic cause helped to 
drive Tyrone into revolt. After the death of his first 
wife he had fallen in love with the beautiful sister of 
Sir Henry Bagnal, the Lord Marshal, and the lady had 
returned his love. In defiance of the fierce opposition 
of her brother, she eloped with the Irish chief, and made 
Bagnal the remorseless enemy of Tyrone. 

Bagnal used all his influence to discredit Tyrone in 
the eyes of the English Government, and he succeeded. 
Urged by Red .Hugh and the rebellious chiefs on the 
one side, and by the enmity of Bagnal and the growing 
distrust of the English Government on the other, Ty- 
rone in the end consented to give the powerful support 
of his name and his arms to a skilfully planned con- 
federation of the tribes. On all sides the Irish chiefs 
entered into the insurrection. O'Neil was certainly the 
most formidable Irish leader the English had yet en- 
countered. He was a brilliant general and a skilled 
politician, and even Mr. Froude admits that ' his career 
is unstained with personal crimes.' He defeated an 
English army under Bagnal at the Blackwater, after a 
fierce battle, inflamed by more than mere national ani- 
mosity. Each leader was animated by a bitter hatred 
of his opponent, which lends something of an Homeric 
character to the struggle by the Blackwater. But Ty- 
rone was fortunate in war as in love. Bagnal's forces 
were completely defeated, and Bagnal himself killed. 
Fortune seemed to smile on Tyrone's arms. Victory 
followed victory. In a little while all Ireland, with the 
exception of Dublin and a few garrison towns, was in 
the hands of the rebels. Essex, and the largest army 
ever sent to Ireland, crossed the Channel to cope with 



46 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

him; but Essex made no serious move, and after an in- 
terview with Tyrone, in which he promised more than 
he could perform, he returned to England to his death. 
His place was taken by Lord Mountjoy, who, for all his 
love of angling and of Elizabethan ' play-books,' was a 
stronger man. Tyrone met him, was defeated. From 
that hour the rebellion was over. A Spanish army that 
had come to aid the rebels hurriedly re-embarked; 
many of the chiefs began to surrender; wild Red Hugh 
O'Donnell, flying to Spain to rouse allies, was poi- 
soned and died. The sufferings of the Irish were terri- 
ble. Moryson, Mountjoy's secretary, a great traveller 
for his time, a Ulysses of ten years' wanderings, tells 
much the same stories of the after-consequences of this 
revolution, which were told by Spenser of the former. 
The carcases of people lay in ditches, their dead mouths 
open, green with the docks and nettles on which they 
had endeavoured to support life. Young children were 
trapped and eaten by the starving women who were 
hiding in the woods on the Newry. He and Sir Arthur 
Chichester witnessed the horrible spectacle of three 
young children devouring the entrails of their dead 
mother. 

At last Tyrone was compelled to come to terms. He 
surrendered his estates, renounced all claim to the title 
of The O'Neil, abjured alliance with all foreign powers, 
and promised to introduce English laws and customs 
into Tyrone. In return he received a free pardon and 
a re-grant of his title and lands by letters patent. Rory 
O'Donnell, Red Hugh's brother, also submitted, and 
was allowed to retain the title of Earl of Tyrconnel. 
Elizabeth was already dead, and the son of Mary Stuart 
was King of England when these terms were made; 
but they were not destined to do much good. 

Tyrone was brought to London to meet King James. 
He stayed at Wanstead as Mountjoy's guest, where 
four-and-twenty years before he had been present at 
Leicester's entertainment of Queen Elizabeth. Those 
four-and-twenty years had brought many changes: 
they had carried away many gallant gentlemen and 
wise statesmen and brave soldiers; they had changed 



ELIZABETH. 4/ 

Tyrone from the brilliant young man dreaming after 
liberty into the * new man ' of Elizabeth's successor. 

Tyrone returned to Ireland, but not to peace. King 
James was determined to reform the country after his 
own fashion, and in King James's mind reform meant 
supporting the Protestant religion everywhere, enforc- 
ing all laws against the Catholics, crushing out what- 
ever remains of the old Brehon laws still lingered in 
the country, and definitely establishing the English 
law, which only the English settlers liked, in its stead. 
Sir George Carew had been deputy, and had come back 
to England with a store of money, and Chichester was 
in his place making himself hateful to the Irish by his 
ingenious methods of wresting their land from its right- 
ful owners, and by his pitiless intolerance of the Catholic 
religion. The Irish Catholics had hoped for toleration 
from James — James, indeed, promised them on his ac- 
cession the privilege of exercising their religion in pri- 
vate; but he soon revoked his promise, and the state of 
the Irish Catholics was worse than before. Tyrconnel 
himself was called upon to conform to the English 
faith. Lest these and kindred exasperations might 
arouse once more the dangerous wrath of the chiefs, 
Chichester enforced a rigorous disarmament of the 
Kernes.' It is hardly to be wondered at if the reform- 
ing spirit of James did not greatly commend itself to 
two such national leaders as Tyrone and Tyrconnel; it 
would not be very surprising if they had thoughts of 
striving against it. Whether they had such thoughts 
or not, they were accused of entertaining them. They 
were seen to be dangerous enemies to the king's policy, 
whom it would be convenient to have out of the way, 
and they were proclaimed as traitors. They seem to 
have been convinced of the impossibility of resistance 
just then; they saw that it was death to remain, and 
they fled into exile. ' It is certain,' says the Four Mas- 
ters, ' that the sea never carried, and the winds never 
wafted, from the Irish shores individuals more illus- 
trious or noble in genealogy, or more renowned for 
deeds of valour, prowess, and high achievements.' 
Tyrone with his wife, Tyrconnel with his sister and 



48 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HITSORY. 

friends and followers, ninety-nine in all, set sail in one 
smal boat on the 14th September, 1607, and tossed for 
twenty-one days upon the raging waves of the sea. We 
hear of O'Neil trailing his golden crucifix at the vessel's 
wake to bring about a calm; of two storm-worn mer- 
lins who took shelter in the rigging and were kindly 
cared for by the Irish ladies. On the 4th of October 
they landed at Quilleboeuf, on the coast of France, and 
made their way to Rouen, receiving kind treatment at 
all hands. James demanded their surrender, but Henri 
Quatre refused to comply, though he advised the exiles 
to go into Flanders. 

Into Flanders they went, their ladies giving the Mar- 
shal of Normaiidy those two storm-worn merlins they 
had cherished as a token of their gratitude for his kind- 
ness. From Flanders, in time, they made their way to 
Rome, and there they lived in exile, and died long years 
after. Tyrconnel died first, in 1608, and the Four Mas- 
ters weep over his early eclipse. Clad in the simple 
robe of a Franciscan friar, he was buried in the Fran- 
ciscan church of St. Pietro in Montorio, where the Ja- 
niculum over looks the glory of Rome, the yellow Tiber 
and the Alban Hills, the deathless Coliseum and the 
stretching Campagna. Raphael had painted his trans- 
figuration for the grand altar; the hand of Sebastiano 
del Piombo had coloured its walls with the scourging 
of the Redeemer. Close at hand tradition marks the 
spot where Peter was crucified. In such a spot, made 
sacred by all that art and religion could lend of sanc- 
tity, the spirit of Tyrconnel rested in peace at last. His 
companion in arms and in misfortune survived him 
some eight years. We have a melancholy picture of old 
Tyrone wandering about in Rome, and wishing in vain 
to be back in his own land and able to strike a good 
blow for her. He died at last on July 20th, 16 16, in the 
seventy-sixth year of his age, a brave, sad, blind old 
man. He was buried in the little church on the Janic- 
ulum, by the side of Tyrconnel. 



THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 49 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 

After the flight of the earls, Ireland was entirely in 
James's hands. The very few who opposed his author- 
ity were sternly and summarily dealt with. His writ 
ran in every part of the island; there was a sheriff for 
every shire; the old Irish law was everywhere super- 
seded; there was nothing to interfere with James's 
schemes for confiscating Irish land and planting Irish 
provinces. The English had already made strong set- 
tlements in Leinster,.Connaught, and Munster. Ulster 
had hitherto been practically untouched, but now at 
last it too was to come under the control of the Crown. 
The alleged treason of the two earls served as an ex- 
cuse for confiscating the counties of Donegal, Derry, 
Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, and Armagh. A sort of 
commission sat at Limavaddy to parcel out the lands 
of men who had committed no other offence than that 
of serving under the exiled chieftains. Ulster was 
planted with a thoroughly Protestant and anti-Irish 
colony of English and Scotch adventurers, and the 
Irish were driven away from the fertile lands like Red 
Indians to contracted and miserable reservations, while 
the fighting-men were shipped off to swell the armies 
of Gustavus Adolphus. Twelve City of London com- 
panies bought great tracts of land in Derry at very 
cheap rates. Six of these companies— the Mercers, 
Salters, Skinners, Ironmongers, Fishmongers, and 
Drapers — still retain much of the property thus ac- 
quired. The disinheriting process was carried on not 
by force alone, but by fraud. Men called ' discoverers' 
made it their business to spy out flaws in titles of land, 
in order that they might be confiscated by the Crown.' 

Conspicuous among the English adventurers, a very 
mirror of the merits of his kind, is Richard Boyle, who 



50 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

afterwards became the first Earl of Cork. He was a 
man of very low beginnings. He has been happily 
described as a forger, a horse-thief, and a conniver at 
murder, who made Providence his inheritance and 
prospered by it. Boyle landed in Dublin on Midsum- 
mer Eve, June 23, 1588, with some twenty-seven pounds 
in his pocket, a couple of suits of clothes, a diamond 
ring and a gold bracelet, and of course his rapier and 
dagger. After seven years' stay, the adventurer was 
lucky enough, aided perhaps by the diamond ring and 
the gold bracelet, to win the heart and hand of a lady 
of Limerick with five hundred pounds a year. This 
was the beginning of his fortunes. From that hour 
lands and money accumulated about him. As long as 
he got it he little cared how it came. No man was 
more ready to lay his hands upon any property of the 
Church or otherwise that he could securely close them 
over. He swindled Sir Walter Raleigh, then in prison 
and near his death, out of his Irish land for a sum 
shamelessly below its value, and throve upon the 
swindle. He is a fair type of the men with whom 
James planted Ulster and Leinster, and with whom he 
would have planted Connaught, but that he died before 
he was able to carry that scheme into effect. But 
Charles inherited the scheme. Ingenious court lawyers 
investigated and invalidated the titles of the Connaught 
landlords, and Charles soon found himself the owner 
of all Connaught, in the same sense that a burglar is 
the owner of the watches, the plate, and jewels, that 
are the results of a successful ' plant.' But land was 
not enough for Charles; he wanted money He was 
always wanting mone)'', and he found a means of rais- 
ing it in Ireland by promising grants of civil and re- 
ligious liberty to the Catholics in exchange for so much 
down. The money was soon forthcoming, but the 
promised liberties never came. Charles's great ally 
in the management of Ireland was Thomas Went- 
worth, to whom the government of the country was 
given. Strafford devoted the great abilities, of which 
Lord Digby truly said 'that God hadgiven him 
the use and the devil the application,' to support- 



THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 5 I 

ing Charles's fraudulent schemes for extorting money, 
until his malign influence was removed by the sum- 
mons to England which ended in his death. But 
when the revolution began in England which ended 
with the fall of the king's head, many of the Irish 
thought their time had come. In 1641 the remnant of 
native Irish in Ulster rose, under Sir Phelim O'Neil, 
against the oppression of the Scotch settlers. This ris- 
ing of 1641 has been written about often enough by 
English historians, as if it were an act of unparalleled 
wickedness and ferocity. It is written of with horror 
and hatred as the 'massacre of 1641.' Mr. Froude in 
especial has lent all the weight of his name and his 
eloquence to this theory of a gigantic and well-organ- 
ized massacre; but Mr. Froude's statements are too 
curiously in advance of his evidence, and his evidence 
too untrustworthy to claim much historical import- 
ance. The business of 1641 was bad enough without 
Mr. Froude doing his best to make it worse. In one 
part of Ireland a certain body of men for a short time 
rose in successful insurrection, and they killed their op- 
pressors as their oppressors had always killed their kin, 
wherever they could get at them. Undoubtedly there 
were a great many people killed. That, of course, no one 
attempts, no one desires, to justify; but is must be re- 
membered that it was no worse than any one of the many 
massacres of the Irish by the English, which had taken 
place again and again, any time within the memory of 
the men then living, to go no farther back. Far be it 
from me, far be it from anyone, to defend the cruelties 
that accompanied the rising of 1641; but it is only fair 
to remember that most nations that have been treated 
cruelly are cruel in their revenge when they get it, and 
the followers of Sir Phelim O'Neil believed they had as 
bitter wrongs to avenge as men can have. They had 
been taught lessons of massacre by their masters, and 
this was their first essa}'". The massacre of Mullagh- 
mast, Essex's treacherous massacre of the clan O'Neil, 
the dragooning of Connaught by Bingham, the desola- 
tion of Munster, all these atrocities are slurred over in 
order to lend an uncontrasted horror to Irish crimes. 



52 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Mr. Prendergast and Mr. John Mitchel have both writ- 
ten to show the terrible exaggerations that have at- 
tended upon all representations of the rising of 1641. 
These are Irish historians; but an English historian, 
Mr. Goldwin Smith, is fairer than Mr. Froude. To 
him the early part of the rising presents a * picture of 
the vengeance which a people, brutalized by oppres- 
sion, wreaks in the moment of its brief triumph on its 
oppressor.' He considers it 'to have been unpremedi- 
tated, and opposed to the policy of the leaders;' and 
when the struggle had begun, ' the English and Scotch 
settlers perhaps exceeded the Irish in atrocity, espe- 
cially when we consider their comparative civilization. 
The Irish population of Island Magee, though innocent 
of the rebellion, were massacred, man, woman, and 
child, by the Scotch garrison of Carrickfergus.' The 
historian Borlase, kinsman to the chief justice of that 
name, rejoicing over the exploit of the soldiers against 
the rebels, mentions as one item how Sir W. Cole's 
regiment 'starved and famished of the vulgar sort, 
whose goods were seized on by this regiment, 7,000.' 
No cruelties on the one side can ever justify retaliation 
on the other, but to mention them will at least serve to 
dispel the idea which Mr. Froude would willingly foster, 
that at a sudden point in the history of a blameless and 
bloodless rule, some wicked Irish rose up and slew 
some of their just and merciful masters. The masters 
were neither just nor merciful, bloodless nor blameless. 
It was hardly to be expected that a people, treated as 
they had been, would act very mercifully when their 
turn came. Yet in many cases they did act mercifully. 
The followers of Sir Phelim spared some lives they 
might have taken; pitied some who were in their power. 
. There has been monstrous exaggeration about the 
stories of wholesale massacre. Most of the evidence 
given before the commission sent to inquire into the 
tiling is given on hearsay, and it is on this evidence 
that the accounts of the massacre depend. Old women 
who were ill in bed, and saw nothing of the struggle, 
gave as evidence the statements of friends, who told 
them that in many places thousands of persons were 



THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 53 

massacred. Others, again, were assured of such 
slaughterings of hundreds and thousands of persons in 
different parts of the country by the rebels themselves, 
who display throughout the evidence a most remarka- 
ble taste for self-accusation. Equally valuable and 
veracious evidence testifies that the ghosts of the mur- 
dered were seen stalking abroad — that in the river near 
Portadown, where the worst of the killing was said to 
have been, the body of a man stood erect for three days 
in the middle of the water, and that corpses floated 
against the stream several days after they had been 
drowned, in order to meet one of their murderers who 
was crossing the bridge! 

However it began, Sir Phelim O'Neil's rising soon 
flamed up into a general rebellion. One of the most 
prominent of its leaders was Roger Moore, the last of a 
stately, ruined family, one of whose ancestors had died 
in the Tower under Edward VI. He was a brave and 
honourable gentleman, whose handsome face and grace- 
ful bearing commended him closely to the men from 
whom he sought help, whom his eloquence was well cal- 
culated to persuade, and his statesmanlike prudence 
and foresight to encourage. His daring and gallantry 
endeared him to his followers, who were always ready 
to fight their best for the war cry of 'For God, our 
Lady, and Roger Moore.' At his instance Colonel 
Owen O'Neil, better known as Owen Roe, came over 
from Spain to consolidate and command the insurrec- 
tion. He was a nephew of the great Tyrone who had 
died in Rome; he was a brave and gallant gentleman, 
of high and honourable position in the Spanish army; 
he was the natural leader of the Irish people. Success 
at first was strewn before his feet. A National Conven- 
tion met at Kilkenny in October, 1642, to establish the 
independence of Ireland. It took upon itself all the 
powers of a Provisional Government: appointed the 
officers of its army; organized provincial councils; 
issued proclamations; ordered its own seal to be cut; 
established a mint for coining its own money, and in 
every way showed itself ready to carry out the work of 
national administration. Frequent help came from 



54 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

abroad. In O'Neil's hands the army acquired new 
strength, and the struggle was carried on with marked 
humanity. The insurrection seemed in a fair way to 
become a successful revolution. There were altogether 
four parties in Ireland, three of whom it was to the 
king's advantage to conciliate. The fourth and least 
important was that of the Puritans and the English 
Parliament, headed by the Lord Justices Parsons and 
Borlase, whom Mr. Goldwin Smith describes as a pair 
of scoundrels who had done tlieir best to foment the 
rebellion for their own advantage, and Generals Munroe 
and Coote the cruel. The three other parties were, 
first, the native Irish, under Owen Roe, guided by the 
Papal Nuncio Rinuccini, v/ho had come over from Rome 
to lend his support and counsels to the movement; sec- 
and, the Anglo-Irish, chiefly composed of Catholic no- 
bles, who supported the king but stood out for their 
own rights and religion; and, thirdl}', the king's party, 
with his Lord-Deputy, Lord Ormond, at its head. Lord 
Ormond was a Protestant, entirely devoted to his king, 
and compelled to play a very difficult game in trying to 
keep together the rebellious Irish who were willing to 
support Charles, and yet at the same time avoid giving 
offence to Charles's English followers, who wished for 
no terms with the Irish. Like most of the Irish leaders 
of his time, Ormond had had a strangely chequered 
career. He was the grandson of the eleventh Earl of 
Ormond, whose estates had been unjustly filched from 
him by his son-in-law. Sir Richard Preston, who had 
obtained the favour of James, and with it the patent of 
the earldom of Desmond. Young James Butler seemed 
thus quite cut off from his inheritance, but he was lucky 
enough to meet and win the affections of Preston's 
daughter, his cousin. He married her, and so in time 
came into not only the title of Earl of Ormond, but 
into the possession of the good broad lands of the fam- 
ily. Ormond had managed his own affairs skilfully 
enough, but he was not the man to fill a position of 
great and responsible statesmanship. His mediocre 
abilities and temporizing spirit were quite unsuited to 
the desperate circumstances in which he was placed. 



THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 55 

Charles himself, harassed by English revolutionists at 
home, made many and any pledges to the Irish revolu- 
tionists, in the hope of winning them to his side. He 
never had the chance of breaking these pledges. The 
execution at Whitehall left Cromwell free to deal with 
Ireland. He entered Ireland with 8,000 foot and 4,000 
horse, and marched from victory to victory. Every- 
thing was in his favour: his own military genius, the 
laurels of Worcester and Naseby, the disorganization 
of the Irish parties and the contentions that had sprung 
up amongst them, especially the removal of the only 
man really capable of doing anything against the Lord 
General in the field. Owen Roe O'Neil died suddenly, 
it was said, of course, by poison, though there seems 
little reason to believe this, and with his death all 
chance of the independence dreamed of by the Kilkenny 
Convention was over for that time. Roger Moore, the 
gallant and heroic, was already dead, killed, it was said, 
by bitter disappointment at the gradual failure of the 
cause he had so much at heart. Sir Phelim O'Neil was 
captured soon after. However he had lived, he died 
like a brave man; he was offered a pardon if he would 
only say that he took up arms by the king's command, 
but he preferred to die. One after another the Irish 
leaders surrendered or were defeated. The king's party 
was practically nowhere. Ormond had fled to France 
for his life. After Cromwell had captured Drogheda 
and put all its people to the sword; after he had con- 
quered Wexford and slaughtered no less pitilessly its 
inhabitants, the revolution was at an end. Ireland was 
at Cromwell's mercy, and like all his predecessors, he 
resolved to make a new settlement. 

The government of Ireland was now vested in a 
deputy commander-in-chief and four commissioners, 
with a high court of justice, which dealt out death, 
exile, and slavery in liberal measure. The Parliament 
had soothed the claims of its army by giving its officers 
and men debentures for Irish land, and similar deben- 
tures were held by a vast number of adventurers, who 
had speculated thus in Irish land, while the struggle 
was going on, to the amount of some 2,500,000 acres. 



56 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

These claims had now to be settled; but the adven- 
turers were not willing to settle until all possible dan- 
ger was removed. There were disbanded soldiers in 
Ireland who might interfere with the peaceful settle- 
ments of Cromwellian would-be landlords, and these 
must be got rid of before any serious plantation could 
be effected. Word was sent throughout Europe that 
nations friendly to the Commonwealth would not beat 
their drums in vain in the market places of Irish garri- 
son towns. The valour of Irish soldiers was well enough 
known abroad. It had been praised by William the 
Silent and Henry Quatre, and the redeemer of Holland 
and the victor of Ivry were good judges of tall soldiers. 
So the drums of Spain, Poland, and France were set 
rattling all over Ireland, and to their tuck the disbanded 
soldiery marched away to the number of 44,060, between 
165 1 and 1654, to die beneath foreign banners on for- 
eign fields. Women and girls who were in the way of 
the adventurers could be got rid of no less profitably 
to West Indian planters weary of maroon and negro 
women. Into such shameful slavery thousands of un- 
happy Irishwomen were sent, and it was only when, the 
Irish supply being exhausted, the dealers in human flesh 
began to seize upon English women to swell their lists, 
that the practice was prohibited. Sir William Petty 
states that 6,000 boys and girls were sent to the West 
Indies, and the total number transported there and to 
Virginia was estimated at 10,000. Henry Cromwell 
not only approved of the exportation by force of some 
thousand ' Irish wenches ' for the consolation of the sol- 
diers in the newly-acquired colony of Jamaica, but of 
his own motion suggested the shipment also of from 
1,500 to 2,000 boys of from twelve to fourteen years of 
age. 'We could well spare them,' he says, 'and who 
knows but it might be a means to make them English 
— I mean Christians?' 

Now came the turn of the adventurers. The Gov- 
ernment reserved for themselves all the towns, Church 
land, and tithes, and the counties Kildare, Dublin, Car- 
low, and Cork, to satisfy friends and favourites who 
were not army men. The portion of each adventurer 



THE CROMWELLIAN SETTLEMENT. 57 

in Ulster, Leinster, or Munster, was decided by lot, at 
a lottery held in Grocers' Hall, London, in July, 1653. 
To make the condition of the adventurers comfortable, 
each of the planted counties was divided in half, and 
the adventurers were quartered for their greater en- 
courage'ment and pxotection in alternate baronies with 
soldier settlers. The rest of Ireland, except Connaught, 
was apportioned to satisfy the arrears of officers and 
soldiers. To keep the new settlers free from all Irish 
influences, Connaught was appointed as a reservation 
for the Irish, and all English holding lands in Con- 
naught were allowed to exchange them for estates of 
equal value in other parts of Ireland. The Irish were 
then driven and cooped into Connaught. They were 
not allowed to appear within two miles of the river or 
four miles of the sea, and a rigorous passport system 
was established, to evade which was death without 
form of trial. Irish noblemen who were pardoned for 
being Irish were compelled to wear a distinctive mark 
upon their dress under pain of death, and persons of 
inferior rank bore a black spot on the right cheek, under 
pain of branding or the gallows. It is curious to reflect 
that all these precautions were not able to secure the 
Ironsides from the dreaded Irish influence, and that 
forty years later many of the chil'dren of Cromwell's 
troopers could not speak a word of English. 

The plantation of the unhappy Irish in Connaught 
was slowly and sternly accomplished. Landowners 
had the choice of becoming the tenants at will of the 
new settlers, or of dying on the road side. The com- 
missioners were much harassed in the execution of 
their task by the unreasonable clamour of the dispos- 
sessed Irish, who objected to being reserved in Con- 
naught, and complained that the whole of the province 
was waste from famine. There were parts of Con- 
naught where if was truly said that there was not wood 
enough to hang, water enough to drown, or earth 
enough to bury a man. The commissioners, anxious, 
no doubt, that the Irish should know the worst at once, 
had sent the earliest transplanted to this inhospitable 
place, and their dismay communicated itself to the as 



58 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

yet untransplanted. The hunted and harassed Irish 
nobles would not transplant themselves. It needed 
some punishments by death to quicken the general de- 
sire to seek the appointed haven west of the Shannon. 
But death not proving convenient, as executions would 
have had to be ordered wholesale, it was decided to 
ship off the restive Irish who would not go to Con- 
naught to the West Indies. But the unhappy wretches 
who got to Connaught were not at the end of their mis- 
ery. The officers employed to settle them in their new 
homes had to be bribed by money or by portion of the 
reserved land to carry out the law, and the greedy offi- 
cers were easily able to force the unhappy transplant- 
ers to sell the rest of their reduced lots at miserably 
small rates. The transplanted, rich and poor, were 
wretchedly lodged in smoky cabins or under the open 
air, and lay down and measured out their graves in 
common confusion and misery, peer with peasant, 
starved to death. 

The towns were cleared as well. The inhabitants of 
Limerick, Galway, Waterford, and Wexford, were 
ejected with scant compensation and scanter ceremony 
to make room for English merchants from Liverpool 
and Gloucester. The dispossessed Irish merchants fled 
across the seas to carry their skill and thrift to other 
lands, and in the new hands the commercial prosperity 
of the towns dwindled away. Galway, that had been a 
flourishing sea-port, never recovered her resettlement. 
The Irish who were dispossessed, and who would not 
transplant or go into exile, took to the woods and 
mountains, the clefts of the rocks and the caves of the 
earth, and lived a life of wild brigandage, like the 
Greek Klephts dispossessed by the Turk. The Govern- 
ment put a price upon the heads alike of these Tories, 
of priests, and of wolves. 



THE RESTORATION.— WILLIAM OF ORANGE. 59 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE RESTORATION. — WILLIAM OF ORANGE. 

When Cromwell and the Cromwellian rule had passed 
away and the Stuart king came over to ' enjoy his own 
again,' most of the dispossessed Irish gentlemen, whose 
loyalty to his cause and creed had cost them their es- 
tates, and driven them to exile abroad, or worse than 
exile, in the Connaught reservations, thought not un- 
reasonably that they might be allowed to ' enjoy their 
own again,' too, as well as their merry monarch. They 
were grievously disappointed. The Cromwellian land- 
holders were quite prepared to secure their estates by 
loyal recognition of the new rule, and their adhesion 
was far more serviceable to the Second Charles than 
the allegiance of the ruined Irish gentlemen. Men like 
Broghill were not prepared to let the lands they had 
got during the Cromwellian settlement slip between 
their fingers. Broghill, the infamous Broghill, as he 
has been justly called, was a worthy son of the adven- 
turer Richard Boyle, who has passed into history as 
the * great Earl of Cork.' Boyle was a great robber, 
but Broghill was a greater, and a traitor as well. He 
had served every ruling Government in turn, and had 
always contrived to make his subservience profitable to 
himself. He got into the good graces of Cromwell by 
the signal services he rendered to his cause in Ireland, 
but he was not prepared to sacrifice the rewards of 
these services, the fair acres he had laid hold of, to any 
sentimental adherence to the Cromwellian principle. 
His treachery secured the Restoration as far as Ireland 
was concerned; he played Monk's part upon the Irish 
stage. The breath once out of Cromwell's body, he 
prepared to intrigue for the return of Charles. He 
found an able assistant in Coote, the cruel president of 
Connaught. Charles rewarded the faithful Broghill 



6o AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

with the confirmation in all his estates, and the title of 
Earl of Orrery. Coote was confirmed in his estates and 
made Earl of Mountrath, This worthy pair of brothers 
were made Lords Justices of Ireland, and in their hands 
the settlement of the Land Question was practically 
left. It is easy to see that it was to the interest of nei- 
ther that there should be a general redistribution of 
land. They arranged an ingenious scheme by which 
only those who proved themselves 'innocent' of a cer- 
tain series of offences should be reinstated. No man 
was to be held 'innocent ' who had not belonged to the 
Royal party before 1643, or who had been engaged in 
the Confederacy before 1648, or who had adhered to 
the party of the Papal Nuncio. Lest this might not 
sufficiently limit the list of the ' innocent,' it was de- 
cided that no one deriving his title from such offenders, 
and no one who played a merely passive part, living, 
that is to say, on his estate, and leaning neither to the 
one side nor the other, should be allowed to regain the 
lands he had lost. This system was so well worked 
that except in the rarest cases the plundered Irish were 
unable to get back an acre of land from the new men. 
Ormond and a few others were restored at once to 
their estates and honours without any difficulty, and 
the rest were left as they were. 

Ormond was made Lord Lieutenant, and once again 
showed that he was not strong enough for his stormy 
times. He opposed, but could not prevent, the efforts 
of the English Cabal to prohibit the importation of 
Irish cattle as a nuisance. The Cabal found no diffi- 
culty in carrying their point ; their onl)'^ difficulty was 
whether they should describe the obnoxious importa- 
tion as a ' detriment ' or a 'nuisance,' a -difficulty which 
Clarendon satirically proposed to meet by suggesting 
that it might as fittingly be called 'adultery.' When 
the cattle trade was put down, Ormond (he was now 
duke of that name) did his best to advance the Irish 
woollen and linen trades, but these efforts rendered 
him hateful to the Cabal, and he was removed from 
office. For long enough he lingered in disgrace, attend- 
ing at Charles's court in London, and quietly enduring 



THE RESTORATION.— WILLIAM OF ORANGE. ■ 6 1 

the insults that Charles and his favourites put upon 
him, and the dangers of assassination to which his ene- 
mies exposed him. At length he was restored to the 
Irish Lord Lieutenantship, and the record of his last 
administration is chiefly a record of measures against 
the Roman Catholics. Charles indeed was anxious to 
allow the Catholics as much toleration as possible, but 
the fury of the Titus Gates Plot found its echo across 
the Irish sea. Ormond's nature was not one which 
lent itself to excesses of any kind, but he was strongly 
anti-Catholic, and to him is due the dishonour of send- 
ing Plunkett, the Archbishop of Armagh, to his trial 
and death in England, a ' murder ' which, as Mr. Gold- 
win Smith says, ' has left a deep stain on the ermine of 
English justice.' 

With James's accession the treatment of the Catholics 
changed considerably. Grmond was recalled to end 
his days in peaceful retirement, and his place was taken 
by a new and remarkable figure, the bearer of a historic 
name. This new man was James Talbot, Earl of Tyr- 
connel. He was, while a boy, in Drogheda during the 
Cromwellian sack, and the memory of that fearful hour 
was always with him. He had followed the Stuarts 
into exile; he was the first Roman Catholic Governor 
of Ireland appointed since the introduction of the Prot- 
estant religion. He did his best to undo the severe anti- 
Catholic legislation which marked Ormond's last ad- 
ministration. That he, a Catholic and an Irishman, 
should wish to see justice and religious liberty allowed 
to his countrymen and the companions of his faith has 
made his name too often the object of the obloquy and 
the scorn of historians who are unwilling to see liberty, 
either political or religious, enjoyed by any but them- 
selves and their own people or party. The war between 
James and William of Orange found the Catholics in 
Ireland entirely on the Stuart side, though more for 
the sake of Talbot of Tyrconnel than of the English 
monarch. Talbot might have said of himself, like 
Shakespeare's English Talbot, that he was ' but shad- 
ow of himself,' and that ' his substance, sinews, arms, 
and strength ' lay in the Irish Catholics who rallied 



62 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

round him as they had before rallied round an earlier 
wearer of the name of Tyrconnel. For a time it seemed 
as if this Irish support might shoulder James into his 
throne again, and the King made many concessions to 
encourage such allegiance. Poynings's Act was form- 
ally repealed, and a measure passed restoring the dis- 
possessed Irish to their property. A large army came 
over from France to Ireland to fight for the Stuart, 
under the command of one of the bravest and vainest 
soldiers that ever fought a field, St. Ruth. But the bat-, 
tie of the Boyne ruined alike the Stuart cause and the 
hopes of its Irish adherents. Ginckel, William's ablest 
general, took Athlone, defeated the French and Irish at 
Aughrim, where the glorious and vain-glorious St. Ruth 
was slain, and invested Limerick. In Limerick Tyr- 
connel died, and at Limerick the last struggle was 
made. The city was held by Patrick Sarsfield, a brave 
Catholic gentleman and a gifted soldier. He defended 
Limerick so well against hopeless odds -that he was able 
to wring from his enemies a treaty providing that the 
Roman Catholics of Ireland should enjoy the privilege 
of religious freedom, and giving King James's followers 
the right of their estates. When the treaty was signed, 
Sarsfield surrendered the city and marched out with 
all the honours of war. Outside of the city the flags of 
England and France were set up, and the defenders of 
Limerick were offered their choice of service under 
either standard. Ginckel had the mortification of see- 
ing the flower of the army rally beneath the lilies of 
Gaul, only a few regiments ranging themselves beneath 
the English standard. These Irish soldiers did splen- 
did service in the land to which they gave their swords. 
Their names became famous in France, in Spain, in 
Austria, and in Russia, and on many a field from Fon- 
tenoy to Ramilies and Laufeldt the Irish brigades fought 
out for an alien causci^ and beneath a foreign flag, the 
old quarrel of their race. Sarsfield himself died bravely 
at Landen, three years after the surrender of Limerick. 
It is said that the dying man looked at his hand, red 
with his own blood, and said, 'Would God that this 
were shed for Ireland.' All that he had done for his 



THE RESTORATION.— WILLIAM OF ORANGE. 63 

country had been done in vain. The treaty that he had 
secured by his gallant defence of Limerick, the treaty 
that had been confirmed and even amplified by William 
himself, was broken and set aside. Mr. Froude seems 
to think that the Irish ought to have been aware that 
the English could not be expected to keep faith with 
them over such a treaty. To such sorry justification 
for such a breach of faith there is nothing to say. The 
treason shows worse when it is remembered that after 
the treaty was signed an army of reinforcements arrived 
in the Shannon. Had these come some days earlier, 
the siege of Limerick must inevitably have been raised. 
Even as it was Ginckel greatly feared that Sarsfield might 
seize the opportunity to renew the war. But Sarsfield 
honourably abided by his word. The treaty was vio- 
lated; all the forfeited lands were reconfiscated and sold 
by auction as before, for the benefit of the State, to 
English corporations and Dublin merchants. At Wil- 
liam's death the Catholics were the owners of less than 
one seventh of the whole area of Ireland. William de- 
termined to make Ireland Protestant by Penal Laws. 
Under these laws Catholics could not sit in the Irish 
Parliament, or vote members to it. They were ex- 
cluded from the army and navy, the corporations, the 
magistracy, the bar, the bench, the grand juries, and 
the vestries. They could not be sheriffs or soldiers, 
game-keepers or constables. They were forbidden to 
own any arms, and any two justices or sheriffs might at 
any time issue a search warrant far arms. The discov- 
ery of any kind of weapon rendered its Catholic owner 
liable to fines, imprisonment, whipping, or the pillory. 
They could not own a horse worth more than five 
pounds, and any Protestant tendering that sum could 
compel his Catholic neighbour to sell his steed. No ed- 
ucation whatever was allowed to Catholics. A Catho- 
lic could not go to the university; he might not be the 
guardian of a child; he might not keep a school, or 
send his children to be educated abroad, or teach him- 
self. No Catholic might buy land, or inherit, or receive 
it as a gift from Protestants, or hold life annuities or 
leases for more than thirty-one years, or any lease on 



64 AI^ OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

such terms as that the profits of the land exceeded one 
third the value of the land. If a Catholic purchased an 
estate, the first Protestant who informed against him 
became its proprietor. The eldest son of a Catholic, 
upon apostatising, became heir at law to the whole es- 
tate of his father, and reduced his father to the position 
of a mere life tenant. A wife who apostatised was im- 
mediately freed from her husband's control, and as- 
signed a certain proportion of her husband's property. 
Any child, however young, who professed to be a Prot- 
estant, was at once taken from his father's care, and a 
certain proportion of his father's property assigned to 
him. In fact, the Catholics were excluded, in their own 
country, from every profession, from ever}'^ Government 
office from the highest to the lowest, and from almost 
every duty or privilege of a citizen. It was laid down 
from the bench by Lord Chancellor Bowes and Chief 
Justice Robinson that 'the law does not suppose any 
such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic,' and 
proclaimed from the pulpit by Dopping, bishop of 
Meath, that Protestants were not bound to keep faith 
with Papists. We are reminded, as we read, of Judge 
Taney's famous decision in the American Dred Scott 
case, that a black man had no rights which a white man 
was bound to respect. Happily humanity and civilization 
are in the end too much for the Doppings and Taneys. 
It is hard for a more enlightened age to believe that 
such laws as "these were ever passed, or being passed 
were ever practised. It was well said that the penal 
code could not have been practised in hell, or it would 
have overturned the kingdom of Beelzebub. But these 
laws, by which the child was taught to behave himself 
proudly against the ancient and the base against the 
honourable, were rigorously enforced in Ireland. The 
records of the House of Lords are full of the vain ap- 
peals of Catholic gentlemen against their dispossession 
by some claimant, perhaps an unworthy member of 
their family, perhaps a bitter enemy, and perhaps a 
hitherto unknown ' discoverer,' who had put on the 
guise of ostentatious Protestantism as a cloak for plun- 
der. In often-quoted, often-to-be-quoted words, Burke, 



THE RESTORATION —WILLIAM OF ORANGE. 65 

in later years, denounced the penal code for its 'vicious 
perfection.' ' For,' said lie, ' I must do it justice: it was 
a complete system, full of coherence and consistency, 
well digested and well composed in all its parts. It 
was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and 
as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and 
degradation of a people, and the debasement in them 
of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the per- 
verted ingenuity of man.' It is encouraging to think 
that even under such laws the spirit of the people was 
not wholly annihilated. The country clung to its pro- 
scribed faith; the ministers of that faith braved shame 
and persecution and death in their unswerving allegi- 
ance to their scattered flocks. They fought bravely 
against the oppression which would have enforced ig- 
norance and all its attendant evils upon an unhappy 
people. When no Catholic might open a school, the 
priests established what were known as hedge schools. 
By the roadside and on the hillside, in ditches and be- 
hind hedges, the children of the people cowered about 
their pastors, fearfully and eagerly striving to attain 
that knowledge which the harsh laws denied them. In 
one other instance the penal laws failed. They could 
take away the Catholic's land, his horse, his life; they 
could hang his priests and burn his place of worship; 
they could refuse him all education; they could deny 
him all rights before the law except the right to be 
robbed and hanged; but they could not compel him 
to change his faith, and they could not succeed in mak- 
ing every Protestant in Ireland a willing creature of 
the new code. By the code, any marriage between a 
Catholic and a Protestant was, by the fact of the hus- 
band and wife being of opposite faiths, null and void, 
without any process of law whatever. A man might 
leave his wife, or a woman her husband, after twenty 
years of marriage in such a case, and bring a legal bas- 
tardy on all their offspring. But for the sake of human 
honour, it is consolatory to remember that the instances 
in which this ever occurred were very rare. The law 
might sanction the basest treachery, but it was not 
able to make its subjects treacherous. 



66 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

The evils of the penal code were further supple- 
mented by the statutory destruction of Irish trade. 
Under Charles T. Stafford had done his best to ruin the 
Irish woollen manufacturers in order to benefit the 
English clothiers. Under Charles II. the importation 
of Irish cattle, or sheep, or swine, was prohibited. In 
1663 Ireland was left out of the Act for the encourage- 
ment of trade, so that all the carrying trade in Irish- 
built ships with any part of his Majesty's dominions 
was prevented. But it was left to William to do the 
worst. In 1696 all direct trade from Ireland with the 
British colonies was forbidden, and a revival of the 
woollen trade was crushed out by an Act which pro- 
hibited the export of Irish wool or woollen goods, from 
any Irish port except Cork, Drogheda, Dublin, Kinsale, 
Waterford, and Youghal, to any port in the world ex- 
cept Milford, Chester, Liverpool, and certain ports in 
the Bristol Channel, under a penalty of ;!^5oo and the 
forfeiture of both ship and cargo. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 6y 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

It has been happily said that Ireland has no history 
during the greater part of the eighteenth century. 
What Burke called 'the ferocious legislation of Queen 
Anne' had done its work of humiliation to the full. 
For a hundred years the country was crushed into 
quiescent misery. Against the tyranny which made 
war at once upon their creed, their intellect, and their 
trade, the Irish had no strength to struggle; neither in 
1715 nor in 1745 did the Irish Catholics raise a hand 
for the Pretenders. The evidence of Arthur Young 
shows how terribly the condition of the peasantry had 
sunk when he is able to state that ' Landlords of conse- 
quence have assured me that many of their cottars 
would think themselves honoured by having their 
wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their mas- 
ters; a mark of slavery which proves the oppression 
under which such people must live.' To add to the 
wretchedness of the people, a terrible famine ravaged 
the country in 1741, the horrors of which almost rival, 
in ghastliness, those of the famine of 1847. Great 
numbers died; great numbers fled from the seemingly 
accursed country to recruit the armies of the Conti- 
nent, and found death less dreadful on many well- 
fought fields, than in the shape of plague or famine in 
their own land. Such elements of degradation and 
despair naturally begot all sorts of secret societies 
amongst the peasantry from north to south. White- 
boys, Oak-boys, and Hearts of Steel banded against the 
land tyranny and held together for long enough in spite 
of the strenuous efforts of the Government to put them 
down. If the military force, said Lord Chesterfield, 
'had killed half as many landlords as it had White- 
boys, it would have contributed more effectually to re- 



68 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Store quiet; for the poor people in Ireland are worse 
used than negroes by their masters, and deputies of 
deputies.' 

Bad as the condition of Ireland was, the English in 
Ireland proposed to make it worse by depriving it of 
what poor remains of- legislative independence it still 
possessed. So early as 1703, a petition in favour of 
union with England, and the abolition of the Irish 
Parliament, was presented to Queen Anne; its prayer 
was rejected for the time, but the idea was working in 
the minds of those — and they were many — who wished 
to see Ireland stripped of all pretence at independence 
afforded by the existence of a separate Parliament, even 
though that Parliament were entirely Protestant. Seven- 
teen years later, in tlie sixth year of George I., a vigor- 
ous blow was dealt at the independence of the Irish 
Parliament by an Act which not only deprived the Irish 
House of Lords of au}'^ appellate jurisdiction, but de- 
clared that the English Parliament had the right to 
make laws to bind tlie people of the kingdom of Ire- 
land, The 'heads of a Bill' might indeed be brought 
in in either House. If agreed to, they were carried to 
the Viceroy, who gave them to his Privy Council to 
alter if they choose, and send to England. They were 
subject to alteration by the English Attorney-General, 
and when approved by the English Privy Council, sent 
back to Ireland, where the Irish Houses could either 
accept or reject them in toto, but had no power to 
change them. 

The condition of the Irish Parliament all through the 
eighteenth century is truly pitiable. Its existence as a 
legislative body is a huge sham, a ghastly simulacrum. 
It slowly drifted into the custom of sitting but once in 
every two years to vote the Money Bills for the next 
two twelvemonths. The Irish Exchequer derived half 
its receipts from the Restoration grant of the Excise 
and Customs; and the greater part of this money was 
wasted upon royal mistresses, upon royal bastards, and 
upon royal nominees. The Parliament was torn by 
factions which the English Government ingeniously 
played off against each other; it was crowded with the 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Og 

supple placemen of the Government, who were well 
rewarded for their obedient votes; the bulk of the 
House was made up of nominees of the Protestant 
landlords. The Opposition could never turn out the 
Administration, for the Administration was composed 
of the irremovable and irresponsible Lords Justices of 
the Privy Council and certain officers of State. The 
Opposition, such as it was, was composed of Jacobites 
who dreamed of a Stuart Restoration, and of a few men 
animated by a patriotic belief in their country's rights. 
These men were imbued with the principles which had 
been set forth in the end of the seventeenth century by 
William Molyneux, the friend of Locke, who, in his 
' Case of Ireland,' was the first to formulate Ireland's 
constitutional claim to independent existence. His 
book was burnt by the English Parliament, but the 
doctrines it set forth were not to be so destroyed. 
During the reigns of the first two Georges, the Patriot 
Party had the support of the gloomy genius and the 
fierce indignation of the man whose name is coupled 
with that of Molyneux in the opening sentences of 
Grattan's famous speech on the triumph of Irish inde- 
pendence. Swift, weary of English parties, full of mel- 
ancholy memories of St. John and Harley and the scat- 
tered Tory chiefs, had come back to Ireland to try his 
fighting soul in the troublous confusion of Irish politics. 
It has been asserted over and over again that Swift 
had very little real love for the country of his birth. 
Whether he loved Ireland or no is little to the purpose, 
for he did her very sterling service. He was the first 
to exhort Ireland to use her own manufactures, and he 
was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the State for the 
pamphlet in which he gave this advice. When Wood 
received the authority of the English Parliament to 
deluge Ireland with copper money of his own making, 
it was Swift's * Drapier's Letters ' which made Wood 
and his friends the laughingstock of the world and 
averted the evil. In Swift's 'Modest Proposal,' we 
have the most valuable evidence of the misery of the 
country. He suggests, with savage earnestness, that 
the children of the Irish peasant should be reared for 



^0 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

food; and urges that the best of these should be re- 
served for the landlords, who, as they had already de- 
voured the substance of the people, had the best right 
to devour the flesh of their children. 

Even as the most conspicuous supporter of the Irish 
interest during the first half of the century was the 
Dean of St. Patrick's, the two most remarkable sup- 
porters of the English 'interest' in Ireland in the eigh- 
teenth century were both Churchmen, the Primate 
Boulter and the Primate Stone. Compared to Stone, 
Boulter appears an honest and an honourable man. He 
was only shallow, arrogant, and capricious, quite inca- 
pable of the slightest sympathy with any people or 
party but his own — a man of some statesmanship, 
which was entirely at the service of the Government, 
and which never allowed him to make any considera- 
tion for the wants, the wishes, or the sufferings of the 
Irish people. Perhaps the best that can be said of him 
is, that while belonging to the English Church, he did 
not wholly neglect its teachings and its duties, or live 
a life in direct defiance of its commands, which is say- 
ing a good deal for such a man in such a time. So 
much cannot be said of his successor in the headship 
of the Irish ecclesiastical system, Primate Stone. The 
grandson of a gaoler, he might have deserved admira- 
tion for his rise if he had not carried with him into the 
high places of the Church a spirit stained by most of 
the crimes over which his ancestor was appointed 
warder. In an age of corrupt politics he was conspicu- 
ous as a corrupt politician; in a profligate epoch he 
was eminent for profligac)^ In the basest days of the 
Roman Empire he would have been remarkable for the 
variety of his sins; and the grace of his person, which 
caused him to be styled in savage mockery the ' Beauty 
of Holiness,' coupled with his ingenuity in pandering 
to the passions of Ins friends, would have made him a 
serious rival to Petronius at the court of Nero. 

The year that Swift died, 1745, was the first year of 
the Viceroyalty of Lord Chesterfield, one of the few 
bright spots in the dark account of Ireland in the 
eighteenth century. If all Viceroys had been as calm 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 7 1 

as reasonable, and as considerate as the author of the 
famous 'Letters' showed himself to be in his dealings 
with the people over whom he was placed, the history 
of the succeeding century and a half might have been 
very different. But when Chesterfield's Viceroyalty 
passed away, the temperate policy he pursued passed 
away as well, and has seldom been resumed by the long 
succession of Viceroys who have governed and mis- 
governed the country since. 

In the meanwhile a new spirit was gradually coming 
over the country. Lucas, the first Irishman, in the 
words of the younger Grattan, ' who, after Swift, dared 
to write freedom,' had founded the Freeman's Journal, 
a journal which ventured in dangerous times to advo- 
cate the cause of the Irish people, and to defy the anger 
of the English ' interest.' In the first number, which 
appeared on Saturday, September lo, 1763, and which 
bore an engraving of Hibernia with a wreath in her 
right hand and a rod in her left, Lucas loudly advocated 
the duty and dignity of a free press, and denounced 
under the guise of 'Turkish Tyranny,' 'The Tyranny 
of French Despotism,' and 'The Ten Tyrants of Rome,' 
the ministries and the creature whom his unsparing 
eloquence assailed. The Patriot Party, too, was rapidly 
increasing its following and its influence in the country. 
The patriotic party in Parliament had found a brilliant 
leader in Henry Flood, a gifted politician, who thought 
himself a poet, and who was certainly an orator. Flood ' 
was the son of the Irish Chief Justice of the King's 
Bench. He had been educated at Trinity College and 
at Oxford, and much of his youth was devoted to the 
study of oratory and the pursuit of poetry. He wrote 
an ode to Fame, which was perhaps unlucky in reach- 
ing its address as that poem to posterity of which poor 
Jean Baptiste Rousseau was so proud. But his oratory 
was a genuine gift, which he carefully cultivated. We 
hear of his learning speeches of Cicero by heart, and 
writing out long passages of Demosthenes and ^Eschines. 
His character was kindly, sweet-tempered, and truthful. 
He was ambitious because he was a man of genius, but 
his ambition was for his country rather than for him- 



72 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

self, and he served her with a daring spirit, which only 
the profound statesmanlike qualities of his intellect 
prevented from becoming reckless. In 1759, then in 
his twenty- seventh year, a married man with a large 
fortune, he entered public life, never to leave it till the 
end of his career. He came into Parliament as member 
for Kilkenny, and almost immediately became a prom- 
inent member of the Opposition. His maiden speech 
was a vigorous attack upon the corrupt and profligate 
Primate Stone. In the hands of Flood, ably seconded 
by Charles Lucas, the Opposition began to take shape, 
and to become a serious political power. Under his 
brilliant and skilful chieftainship, the ' Patriots,' as the 
party who followed him were called in scorn by their 
enemies, and in admiration by their allies, made re- 
peated assaults upon the hated pension list. After 
they had been defeated again and again, Flood found a 
more successful means of harassing the Administration 
by turning the attention of his party to Parliamentary 
reform. The time was well chosen. The English Gov- 
ernment was beginning to be troubled by its own greedy 
placemen, who were always ready to go with light 
hearts into the Opposition lobby if they could not 
squeeze all they wanted out of the Government. By 
taking advantage of the discontent of placemen, the 
patriots were able to induce the House to declare that 
they alone had the right to initiate a Money Bill, and 
to refuse to accept a Money Bill brought in by the Eng- 
lish or Irish Privy Council. It is bitterly to be re- 
gretted that Flood allowed himself to be led away from 
the Patriot Party, and to accept a Government sinecure. 
There is no need to doubt that when Flood accepted 
the office of Vice-Treasurer he believed that he was 
acting on the whole in the interests of the cause he 
represented. He had just made a great political tri- 
umph. He had driven out of office a most obnoxious 
and unpopular Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Townsend, and 
Townsend's place had been taken by Lord Harcourt, a 
reasonable and able man, who seemed likely to be in 
sympathy with Flood's views as to the independence 
of Parliament, Flood may well be assumed to have 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 73 

reasoned that a place under Government would offer 
him greater opportunities for urging his cause. But, 
whatever his reasons, the step was fatally ill-advised; 
he lost the confidence of the country, and ruined his 
position as leader. But this was the less to be regretted 
that it gave his place as leader of the Patriot Party to 
a greater orator and a nobler man— to Henry Grattan. 

Grattan was born in 1750, in Dublin. His years of 
early manhood were passed in London, studying for 
the Bar. Like Flood, he believed himself destined to 
be a poet; but when in 1775 he was nominated to rep- 
resent Charlemont in the Irish Parliament by the owner 
of the borough. Lord Charlemont, he discovered where 
his real genius lay. He and Flood had been close 
friends and political allies until Flood's acceptance of 
the Vice-Treasurership. This seemed to Grattan the 
basest political apostacy. " The alliance between the 
two orators was definitely broken off; the friendship 
was finally severed in the fierce discussion that took 
place between them in the House of Commons some 
years later, when Flood tauntingly described Grattan 
as a 'mendicant patriot,' and Grattan painted Flood as 
a traitor in one of the most crushing and pitiless pieces 
of invective that have ever belonged to oratory. Such 
a quarrel between such men was the more to be re- 
gretted because each had the same end in view, and 
each had special qualifications for furthering that end 
which were not possessed by the other. 

Grattan was now leader of the Patriots. It was his 
ambition to secure legislative independence for the 
Irish Parliament. The war with the American colonies 
gave him the opportunity of realizing his ambition. A 
large force of volunteers had been organized in Ireland 
to defend the island from the attacks of the terrible 
Paul Jones, and the Volunteers and their leaders were 
all in sympathy with the Patriot Party. For the first 
time since the surrender of Limerick, there was an 
armed force in Ireland able and willing to sustain the 
national cause. There were 60,000 men under arms 
under the leadership of the gifted and patriotic Lord 
Charlemont. Among their leaders were Flood him- 



74 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

self and Henry Grattan. The Volunteers formed them- 
selves into an organized convention for the purpose of 
agitating the national grievances. Grattan was not in- 
deed a member of this convention, but he saw that 
with the existence of the Volunteers had come the hour 
to declare the independence of the Irish Parliament, 
and he seized upon the opportunity. He had an army 
at his back; the English Government was still striving 
with Mr. Washington and his rebels, and it had to give 
way. All that Grattan asked for was granted; the 
hateful Sixth Act of George I. was repealed, and Grat- 
tan was able to address a "free people and wish Ireland 
as. a nation a perpetual existence. 

But now that the desires of the Patriot Party had 
been apparentl)^ fulfilled, by a curious example of the 
law of historical reaction, the popularity of Grattan 
began to wane, and that of Flood to wax anew. The 
English hold over the Irish Parliament had been based 
first upon Poynings's Act, and then upon a Declaratory 
Act asserting the dependence of the Irish Parliament. 
It was this Declaratory Act that Grattan, aided by the 
Volunteers, had caused to be repealed, and he and his 
party contended that by this repeal England resigned 
her right over the Irish Parliament. Flood and his 
friends maintained that the repeal of the Declaratory 
Act was not enough, and they would not rest until they 
had obtained a fuller and more formal Renunciation 
Act. There were other differences between Flood and 
Grattan. Grattan was all in favour of the disbands 
ment and dispersal of the Volunteers. Flood was for 
still keeping them in armed existence. Grattan had 
urged that their work had been done, and that their 
presence was a praetorian menace to the newly-acquired 
liberties. Flood believed that their co-operation was 
still needful for the further securing of Irish liberty. 
Yet it is curious to remember that Grattan was the ad- 
vocate of Catholic Emancipation, and that Flood was 
strenuously opposed to it. Grattan carried his point, 
and the Volunteers disbanded and dispersed, very much 
to the disappointment of Flood and the indignation of 
one of the most curious political figures of the time, and 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 75 

one of the most remarkable of the many remarkable 
ecclesiastics who played a part in this period of Irish 
history. This was the Earl of Bristol and Bishop of 
Derry, a son of the Lord Hervey whom Pope strove to 
make eternally infamous by his nickname of Sporus, 
and who has left such living pictures of the court of the 
Second George in the brilliant malignancy of his un- 
rivalled memoirs. The bishop was a cultured, desperate 
dandy, a combination of the typical French abbe of the 
last century with the conventional soldier of fortune. 
He loved gorgeous dresses; he loved to be prominent 
in all things. The Volunteers delighted his wild im- 
agination. He fancied himself the leader of a great 
rebellion, and he babbled to everyone of his scheme 
with ostentatious folly. But though he could command 
popularity among the Volunteers, he could not com- 
mand the Volunteers themselves. They remained 
under the guidance of Charlemont and Flood, and when 
Flood failed in carrying the Volunteer Reform Bill for 
enlarging the franchise, the Volunteers peaceably dis- 
solved. The bishop drifted out of Dublin, drifted into 
Naples, lived a wild life there for many years, became 
a lover of Lady Hamilton's, and died in Rome in 1803. 

While it lasted the free Irish Parliament was worthy 
of its creator. It gave the Catholics the elective fran- 
chise of which they had been so long deprived; up to 
this time no Catholic had been able to record a vote in 
favour of the men who were labouring for the liberty of 
their country. There is no doubt that it would in time 
have allowed Catholics to enter Parliament. But the 
efforts of Grattan after Catholic Emancipation failed, 
and their failure strengthened the hands of the United 
Irishmen. 

The name ' United Irishmen,' designated a number of 
men all over the country who had formed themselves 
into clubs for the purpose of promoting a union of 
friendship between Irishmen of every religious persua- 
sion, and of forwarding a full, fair, and adequate repre- 
sentation of all the people in Parliament. It was in the 
beginning a perfectly loyal body, with a Protestant 
gentleman, Mr. Hamilton Rowan, for its president. 



76 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

James Napper Tandy, a Protestant Dublin trader, was 
secretary. The men who created it were well pleased 
with the success of Grattan's efforts at the independ- 
ence of the Irish Parliament, but they were- deeply 
discontented at the subsequent disbandment of the 
Volunteers and Grattan's comparative inaction. The 
simple repeal of the Sixth George did not answer their 
aspirations for liberty, which were encouraged and ex- 
cited by the outbreak of the French Revolution. ' They 
found a leader in Theobald Wolfe Tone, a young bar- 
rister, brave, adventurous, and eloquent. Allied with 
him was Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the chivalrous, the 
heroic, who had lived long in France and travelled in 
America, who was devoted to two loves, his country 
and his beautiful wife Pamela, the daughter of Philippe 
Egalite and Madame de Genlis. A third leader was 
Arthur O'Connor, Lord Longueville's nephew, and 
member for Phillipstown. They were all young ; they 
were all Protestants; they were all dazzled by the suc- 
cesses of the French Revolution, and believed that the 
House of Hanover might be as easily overturned in 
Ireland as the House of Capet had been in France. 
Wolfe Tone went over to Paris and pleaded the cause 
of Ireland with the heads of the French Directory. His 
eloquence convinced them, and a formidable fleet was 
sent over to Ireland under victorious Hoche. But the 
winds which had destroyed the Armada dispersed the 
French squadron, and no landing was effected. The 
Government was aroused and alarmed; the plans of 
the United Irishmen were betrayed; martial law was 
proclaimed. Arthur O'Connor was at once arrested. 
Edward Fitzgerald lay in hiding in Dublin for some 
days in a house in Thomas Street, but his hiding-place 
was betrayed. He defended himself desperately against 
the soldiers who came to take him, was severely 
wounded, and died of his wounds in prison. The 
room is stiil shown in which the 'gallant and seditious 
Geraldine ' met his death; it is very small, and the 
struggle must have been doubly desperate in the nar- 
row space. It is a dismal little theatre for the tragedy 
that was played in it. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 77 

Before the rebellion broke out, soldiers and yeomen, 
who were generally Orangemen of the most bitter kind, 
were sent to live at free quarters among the peasants 
in every place where any possible disaffection was sus- 
pected, and the licentiousness and brutal cruelty of 
these men did much to force hundreds of peasants into 
the rising, and to prompt the fierce retaliation which 
afterwards characterized some episodes of the rebellion. 
The troops and yeomen flogged, picketed, and tortured 
with pitch-caps the unhappy men, and violated the un- 
happy women, who were at their mercy. The Irish 
historian would indeed be fortunate who could write 
that on the Irish side the struggle was disgraced by no 
such crimes. Unhappily this cannot be said. Here it 
cannot be better than to speak in Mr. Lecky's words: 
* Of the atrocities committed by the rebels during the 
bloody month when the rebellion was at its height, it is 
difficult to speak too strongly,' but he goes on to say — 
he is criticizing Mr. Froude — 'an impartial historian 
would not have forgotten that they were perpetrated 
by undisciplined men, driven to madness by a long 
course of savage cruelties, and in most cases without 
the knowledge or approval of their leaders; that from 
the beginning of the struggle the yeomen rarely gave 
quarter to the rebels; that with the one horrible ex- 
ception of Scullabogue the rebels in their treatment of 
women contrasted most favourably and most remark- 
ably with the troops, and that one of the earliest 
episodes of the struggle was the butchery near Kildare 
of 350 insurgents who had surrendered on the express 
promise that their lives should be spared. 

It should be borne in mind, in considering the rebel- 
lion of 1798, that the struggle is not to be considered as 
a struggle of creed against creed. Protestants began 
and organized the movement, and it is estimated by 
Madden that among the leaders of the United Irishmen, 
Catholics were only in the proportion of one to four 
throughout the rebellion. On the other hand, a large 
number of Catholics were strongly opposed to the 
rebellion, and in many cases took active measures 
against it. In Wexford, unhappily, the efforts of the 



78 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Orangemen succeeded in giving the struggle there 
much of the character of a religious war, but this the 
revolution looked at as a whole never was. It was a 
national movement, an uprising against intolerable 
grievances, and it was sympathized with and supported 
by Irishmen of all religious denominations, bound to- 
gether by common injuries and a common desire to 
redress them. 

The great insurrection which was to have shattered 
the power of England was converted into a series of 
untimely, abortive local risings, of which the most 
successful took place in Wexford. The rebels fought 
bravely, but the cause was now hopeless. The Catholic 
clergy came fearlessly to the front; many of the little 
bands of rebels were led into action by priests of the 
Church. Father John Murph}^, Father Philip Roche, 
and Father Michael Murphy, were among the bravest 
and ablest of the revolutionary leaders. Father Michael 
Murphy was long believed by his men to be invulner- 
able, but he was killed by a cannon ball in the fight by 
Arklow. Father Philip Roche also died on the field. 
Father John Murphy, less happy, was captured and 
died on the gallows; so died Bagenal Harvey, of Barry 
Castle, and Anthony Perry, both Protestant gentlemen 
of fortune who had been forced into the rebellion, the 
one by Government suspicion, the other by imprison- 
ment, cruelty, and torture. The revolution v/as crushed 
out with pitiless severity, until the deeds of the English 
soldiers and yeomanry became hateful in the eyes of 
the Viceroy himself. Lord Cornwallis. 'The conversa- 
tion,' he writes in a letter to General Ross, *of the 
principal persons of the country all tends to encourage 
the system of blood; and the conversation even at my 
table, where you will suppose I do all I can to prevent 
it, always turns on hanging, shooting, burning, etc., 
and if a priest has been put to death the greatest joy is 
expressed by the whole company. So much for Ireland 
and my wretched situation.' 

Cornwallis acted mercifully. He proclaimed pardon 
to all insurgents guilty of rebellion only who should 
surrender their arms and take the oath of allegiance. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 79 

Of the State prisoners, the two brothers Sheares were 
hanged; McCann was hanged; Oliver Bond died in 
Newgate; O'Connor, Thomas Addis Emmet and Mc- 
Nevin were banished. 

The insurrection was not quite over when a small 
French force, under General Humbert, landed in Kil- 
lala Bay and entered Longford. But Humbert was 
surrounded by the English under Cornwallis and Gen- 
eral Lake at Ballinamuck, and surrendered at discre- 
tion. The French were treated as prisoners of war, 
but the insurgent peasantry were slaughtered without 
quarter. 

There was still one more scene in the drama of '98. 
A French squadron, under General Hardi, sailed for 
Ireland, but was attacked by an English squadron, and 
hopelessly defeated. Wolfe Tone, who was on board 
the principal vessel, the Hoche, was captured with the 
rest, and entertained with the French officers at Lord 
Cavan's house at Lough Swilly. Here a treacherous 
friend recognized him and addressed him by his name. 
Tone was too proud to affect concealment. He was at 
once sent in irons to Dublin, and tried by court-mar- 
tial; he asked in vain for a soldier's death; he was 
condemned to be hanged, but he cut his throat in 
prison. The wound was not mortal, and he would 
have been hanged, had not Curran moved in the King's 
Bench for a writ of Habeas Corpus, on the ground that 
a court-martial had no jurisdiction while the Law 
Courts were still sitting in Dublin. The writ was 
granted, and Tone died a lingering death in prison. 

Wolfe Tone was buried in Bodenstown, not far from 
the little village of Sallins, some eighteen miles from 
Dublin. Thomas Davis has devoted one of his finest 
lyrics to the green grave in Bodenstown churchyard, 
with the winter wind raving about it and the storm 
sweeping down on the plains of Kildare. The melan- 
choly music of Davis's verse is well-suited to the deso- 
late and deserted grass-grown graveyard and the little 
lonely church, ruined and roofless, and thickly grown 
with ivy, with the grave on the side away from the 
road. When Davis wrote his poem there was no stone 



80 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

upon the grave; now it is railed in with iron rails 
wrought at the top into the shape of shamrocks, and 
marked by a winter-worn headstone, and a stone slab 
with an inscription setting forth tlie name and deeds of 
the man who lies beneath, and ending 'God save Ire- 
land.' 

The leaders of constitutional agitation had taken no 
part in the rebellion of the United Irishmen. Neither 
Grattan nor Flood had belonged to the body, and 
neither of them had any sympathy with its efforts. 
They stood aside while the struggle was going on, and 
the most prominent place in the public mind was taken 
by a man not less gifted than either of them, John 
Curran. Like Grattan and like Flood, Curran began 
his career by trying to play on the double pipes of 
poetry and oratory, and like his great compeers he 
soon abandoned verse for prose. He rose from a very 
humble orgin, by the sheer force of his ability, to a 
commanding position at the Bar and an honourable 
position in Parliament, and his patriotism was never 
stained by the slightest political subservience. Before 
the rebellion of 1798 he had been conspicuous for his 
courage in advocating the causes of men unpopular 
with the Government and the English ' interest,' and 
after the rebellion broke out he rendered himself hon- 
ourably eminent by the eloquence and the daring which 
he offered in turn to the cause of all the leading politi- 
cal prisoners. In his speech for Hamilton Rowan — a 
defence for which he was threatened like a new Cicero, 
but, unlike Cicero, remained undismayed — he made 
that defence of the principle of universal emancipation 
which has been so often, yet cannot be too often, quot- 
ed. ' I speak in the spirit of the British law, which 
makes liberty commensurate with, and inseparable 
from, the British soil, which proclaims even to the 
stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot 
on British earth, that the ground on which he treads is 
holy, and consecrated by the genius of universal emanci- 
pation. No matter in what language his doom may 
have been pronounced; no matter what complexion in- 
compatible with freedom an African or an Indian sun 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 8 1 

may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disas- 
trous battle his liberty may have been cloven dovi^n; 
no matter with what solemnities he may have been de- 
voted upon the altar of slavery — the first moment he 
touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god 
sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in its 
own majesty, his body swells beyond the measure of 
his chains, that burst from around him, and he stands 
redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the irre- 
sistible genius of universal emancipation.' 

Appeals to the ' irresistible genius of universal emanci- 
pation ' were not likely to have much effect just then. 
Martial and civil law vied with each other in severity 
towards the leaders of the United Irishmen. But these 
at least had striven for the cause of emancipation with 
arms in their hands. There was no such excuse to 
justify the measures now taken by the Government 
to ensure that the 'genius of universal emancipation,' 
how^ever 'commensurate with, and inseparable from,' 
British soil, should have very little recognition on Irish 
earth. 

Having destroyed the revolution, the Government 
now determined to destroy the Parliament. The lib- 
erty which Grattan had hoped might be perpetual, en- 
dured exactly eighteen years. Grattan had traced the 
career of Ireland from injuries to arms, and from arms 
to liberty. He was now to witness the reverse of the 
process, to watch the progress from liberty to arms, 
and from arms to injuries. The sword crushed out 
the rebellion, gold destroyed the Parliament. The 
ruin of the Irish Parliament is one of the most shame- 
ful stories of corruption and treachery of which history 
holds witness. It was necessary to obtain a Govern- 
ment majority in the Irish Parliament, and the majority 
was manufactured by the most unblushing bribery. 
The letters of Cornwallis confess the shame of a brave 
soldier at the unworthy means he had to employ in 
obeying the determination of the Government to steal 
from Ireland her newly-obtained liberties. Place and 
ofifice were lavishly distributed. Peerages won the 
highest, and secret service money the lowest of those 



82 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

who were to be bought. The English Ministry had 
decided that Ireland was to be joined to England in an 
indissoluble union, and as Ireland was hostile to the 
scheme the union was effected by force and by fraud. 
The Bill of Union was introduced and passed by a well- 
paid majority of sixty in 1800. The eloquence of Grat- 
tan was raised to the last in immortal accents against 
the unholy pact. But the speech of angels would have 
been addressed in vain to the base and venal majority. 
It is something to remember that a hundred men could 
be found even in that degraded assembly whom the 
Ministry could not corrupt, who struggled to the last 
for the constitutional liberties of their country, and 
who did not abandon her in her agony. 

, It would not be well to leave this part of the story 
without a reference to the volumes which Mr. Froude 
has devoted to the ' English in Ireland in the Eigh- 
teenth Century.' There is perhaps no instance among 
the writings of history in which commanding talents 
have been put to a worse use. The deliberate and 
well-calculated intention of rousing up all the old ani- 
mosities of race and religion, the carefully planned ex- 
aggeration of everything that tells against Ireland, and 
subordination or omission of all to be alleged in her 
favour, are evidence of a purpose to injure which 
happily defeats itself. The grotesque malignity with 
which Mr. Froude regards Ireland and everything Irish 
is so absurdly overdone, that, as Mr. Lecky says, 'his 
book has no more claim to impartiality than an elec- 
tion squib.' ' A writer of English history,' the words 
are Mr. Lecky's again, 'who took the " Newgate Calen- 
dar" as the most faithful expression of English ideas, 
and English murderers as the typical representatives 
of their nation, would not be regarded with unqualified 
respect.' Yet this is literally what Mr. Froude has done 
in his determined effort to envenom old wounds and re- 
kindle the embers of old hatreds. 



EMMET, a CON NELL. 83 



CHAPTER VIII. 

EMMET. O'CONNELL. 

Though the Union was accomplished with the open- 
ing of the century, the exchequers of the two countries 
were not consolidated for a score of years longer, during 
which Ireland suffered much, and England gained much 
by the new contract. England's superior command of 
capital rendered it impossible for Irish trade and enter- 
prise to compete successfully with her while both were 
chained together under the same system, and as a 
natural consequence,Irish trade and enterprise dwindled, 
diminished, and practically disappeared. The Union, 
like too many compacts that have ever been made with 
the willing or unwilling Irish people, was immedi- 
ately followed by a breach of faith. One of the most 
important factors in the securing of the Union was the 
pledge entered into by Pitt, and promulgated all over 
Ireland by print, that legislation on Catholic Emancipa- 
tion and the Tithe Question would be introduced at 
once. It is not to be questioned that such a promise 
must have had great effect, if not in winning actual sup- 
port to the scheme of Union, at least in preventing in 
many cases energetic opposition to it. To many the 
question of Catholic Emancipation was so immediately 
important, on many the grievous burden of the Tithe 
Question pressed so heavily, that they were almost 
ready to welcome any measure which offered to grant 
the one and relieve the other. But the pledge which 
Pitt had made, Pitt could not fulfil. The bigoted and 
incapable monarch, who had opposed more reforms and 
brought more misfortune upon his own country than 
any other of all England's kings, stubbornly refused to 
give his consent to any measure for the relief of the 
Roman Catholics, Pitt immediately resigned, just 
eleven days after the Union had become law. The ob- 



64 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

stinate folly of the third George does not excuse the 
Minister, who had done his best to delude Ireland by- 
arousing hopes which he was not certain of gratifying, 
and making pledges that he was unable to fulfil. 

While the pledges to the Irish people were thus 
broken, the principles which had obtained before the 
Union remained unaltered. The system of corruption, 
which is perhaps inseparable from the Government of 
a Viceroy and a Castle clique, was in nowise diminished, 
and all the important offices of the Irish Executive were 
filled solely by Englishmen. But the deceived people 
could do nothing. The country was under martial law; 
and the experiences of '98 had left behind them a mem- 
orable lesson of what martial law meant. There was no 
means, as there would have been no use, in bringing 
forward their claims to consideration in any constitu- 
tional manner. But the strength of the national feeling 
of anger and despair may be estimated by the fact that, 
in spite of the horrors of the recent revolution, there 
were dangerous riots in several parts of Ireland, and 
that one actual rising took place, a last act of the rebel- 
lion of '98 surviving the Union. A young, brave, and 
gifted man, Robert Emmet, the )^oungest brother of 
Thomas Addis Emmet, planned the seizure of Dublin 
Castle. The rising failed. Emmet might have es- 
caped, but he was in love with Sarah, Curran's daughter, 
and he was captured while awaiting an opportunity for 
an interview with her. Curran was bitted)'' opposed to 
the love affair ; he refused to defend Emmet, and he has 
sometimes been accused in consequence of being in- 
directly the cause of Emmet's death. But we may 
safely assume that no counsel and no defence could have 
saved Emmet then. The trial was hurried through. 
Emmet was found guilty late at night. He was hanged 
the next morning, the 20th of September, 1803, in 
Thomas Street, on the spot where the gloom 5^ church 
of St. Catherine looks down Bridgefoot Street, where 
his principal stores of arms had been found. Just be- 
fore his death he wrote a letter to Richard, Curran's 
son, full of melancholy tenderness, regret for his lost 
love, and resignation for his untimely death: 



EMMET. 0' CON NELL. 85 

' If tliere was anyone in the world in whose breast my 
death might be supposed not to stifle every spark of 
resentment, it might be you ; I have deeply injured you 
— I have injured the happiness of a sister that you love, 
and who was formed to give happiness, to everyone 
about her, instead of having her own mind a prey to 
affliction. Oh, Richard! I have no excuse to offer, but 
that I meant the reverse ; I intended as much happiness 
for Sarah as the most ardent love could have given her. 
I never did tell you how much I idolized her ; it was not 
with a wild or unfounded passion, but it was an attach- 
ment increasing every hour, from an admiration of the 
purity of her mind and respect for her talents. I did 
dwell in secret upon the prospect of our union. I did 
hope that success, while it afforded the opportunity of 
our union, might be the means of confirming an attach- 
ment which misfortune had called forth. I did not look 
to honours for myself — praise I would have asked from 
the lips of no man ; but I would have wished to read in 
the glow of Sarah's countenance that her husband Avas 
respected. My love! Sarah! it was not thus that I 
thought to have requited your affection. I had hoped 
10 be a prop, round which your affections might have 
clung, and which would never have been shaken ; but a 
rude blast has snapped it, and they have fallen over a 
grave.' 

The Government acted against all the persons con- 
cerned in Emmet's rising with a rigour such as only 
panic could inspire. The fear of a French invasion was 
incessantly before the eyes of the English Government, 
and for several years the Habeas Corpus Act was sus- 
pended, and an Insurrection Act in full force. But they 
took no steps whatever to allay the discontent which 
alone could inspire and animate such insurrections. 
Pitt returned to office in 1804 on the distinct under- 
standing that he would no longer weary the King with 
suggestions of relief for the Irish Catholics, and the 
Minister kept his word. The helplessness of the Irish 
Catholics and the obvious indifference of the Govern- 
ment to their condition, now fostered the formation of 
a powerful anti-Catholic association, the Orange Society, 



S6 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

a body organized to support the Crown so long as it 
supported Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, and which 
at one time in later years in England seems to have 
gone near to shifting the succession of the Crown al- 
together. 

For years the government of Ireland drifted along on 
its old course of corruption and indifference. Pitt died, 
and Fox took his place. But the genius of the great 
statesman, ' on whose burning tongue truth, peace, and 
freedom hung,' was quenched within the year, and with 
it the only spirit of statesmanship which understood 
and sympathized with the struggles of the Irish people. 
These struggles were carried on in straggling continuit)^, 
in the form of vain petitions for redress from the 
Catholics of the better class, and of frequent disturb- 
ances of a more or less desperate kind on the part of 
the peasantry. In 1807 the tithe and land difficulties 
created two bodies, known as Shanavests and Caravats, 
who seem to have agitated for a time very fiercely before 
they disappeared under the pressure of the law. But 
once again, after a decade of despair, a new leader of 
the Irish people, a new champion of the Catholic de- 
mands for freedom and the rights of citizenship, came 
upon the scene. 

Daniel O'Connell was the first Irish leader for many 
years who was himself a Roman Catholic. In 1807 he 
had made his first political appearance as a member of 
the committee appointed to present the petitions set- 
ting forth the Catholic claims to Parliament. In 1810 
his name came more prominently before the public as a 
speaker at a meeting called by the Protestant Corpora- 
tion of Dublin to petition for the repeal of the Union. 
He at once began to take a prominent part in the 
Emancipation Movement, which grew in strength and 
determination year by year. Catholic meetings were 
held, and were dispersed by the Government time after 
time, but still the agitation went on. Its chief sup- 
porters in Parliament were Henry Grattan, now an old 
man, and Sir Henry Parnell. In 1820 Grattan died, but 
the cause to which he devoted his life was rapidly 
striding towards success. O'Connell and Richard 



EMMET, a CON NELL. S/ 

Lalor Sheil, an advocate as enthusiastic, an orator only 
less powerful than O'Connell himself, were bringing 
the cause nearer and nearer to its goal. Three Bills, 
embracing Emancipation, disfranchisement of the forty 
shilling householder freeholders, and the payment of 
the Roman Catholic Clergy, were introduced and ad- 
vanced in the House of Commons ; but the House of 
Lords, urged by the Duke of York's ' So help me God ' 
speech against the Bills, was resolutely opposed to them. 
The triumph was only postponed. The agitators dis- 
covered that the Act which prohibited Roman Catholics 
from sitting in Parliament said nothing against their 
being elected, and O'Connell prepared to carry the war 
into Westminster. In 1828 he was returned to the 
House of Commons for Clare county. He refused to 
take the oath, which was expressly framed to exclude 
Catholics from the House. His refusal caused great 
agitation in both countries, and resulted in the passing 
of the Bill for Catholic Emancipation in 1829, after 
which O'Connell took his seat. To O'Connell what 
may be considered as the Parliamentary phase of the 
Irish Movement is due. He first brought the forces of 
constitutional agitation in England to bear upon the 
Irish Question, and showed what great results might be 
obtained thereby. 

The Act for the relief of his Majesty's Roman Catho- 
lic subjects abolished all oaths and declarations against 
transubstantiation, the invocation of saints, and the 
sacrifice of the mass; it allowed all Roman Catholics, 
except priests, to sit and vote in the House of Com- 
mons, and made no such exception for the House of 
Lords. A special form of oath was devised for Roman 
Catholic members of Parliament, the chief provision of 
which called upon them to maintain the Protestant 
succession of the House of Hanover, and to make no 
effort to weaken the Protestant religion. 

Though O'Connell had been the means of calling the 
Act into existence, he was not yet able to take his seat. 
The Act had been passed since his election for Clare; 
its action was not retrospective. When he presented 
himself to be sworn, the old oath, which it was impos- 



88 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

sible for him to take, was presented to him. He re- 
fused it, and was called upon to withdraw. After some 
debate he was heard at the bar of the House. There 
was a division, and his right to take the new oath was 
negatived by 190 to 116.. A new writ was issued for 
Clare. O'Connell was, of course, re-elected without 
opposition, and took his seat and the new oath on the 
4th of Februar)^ 1830. But between O'Connell's first 
and second election a change had been made in the 
composition of the electors. By an Act of Henry VIH., 
which had been confirmed in 1795, freeholders to the 
value of forty shillings over and above all charges were 
entitled to vote, a system which naturally created an 
immense number of small landowners, who were ex- 
pected to vote in obedience to the landlords who cre- 
ated them. O'Connell's election showed that the land- 
lords could not always command the forty shilling 
voters. It was clear that they might be won over to 
any popular movement, and it was decided to abolish 
them, which was accordingly done by an Act passed on 
the same day with the Catholic Emancipation Act. 
The new Act raised the county franchise to ten pounds, 
and freeholders of ten pounds, but under twenty pounds, 
were subjected to a complicated system of registration, 
well calculated to bewilder the unhappy tenant and 
render his chance of voting more difficult. But all 
these precautions did not prevent the triumphant re- 
turn of O'Connell the second time he appealed to the 
electors of Clare, nor did it ever prove of much service 
in repressing the tenants from voting for the leaders of 
popular movements. 

The disenfranchisement produced intense discontent 
throughout the country, and disorder followed close 
on discontent. O'Connell now began to remind Ire- 
land of his promise that Catholic Emancipation was a 
means towards an end, and that end the repeal of the 
Union. He started a society called the * Friend of Ire- 
land,' which the Government at once put down. He 
started another, 'The Anti-Union. Association.' It was 
put down too, and O'Connell was arrested for sedition, 
tried, and found guilty. Judgment was deferred and 



EMMET. 0' CONN ELL. 89 

never pronounced, and O'Connell was released to carry 
on his agitation more vigorously than- ever. With Ire- 
land torn by disorders against which even the Insur- 
rection Acts in force found it hard to cope, with the 
country aflame with anger at the extinction of the 
forty shilling vote, the Government judged it wise and 
prudent to bring in a Bill for Ireland in January, 1832, 
effecting still further disfranchisement. The new Bill 
abolished the forty shilling vote in boroughs as well as 
in counties, and the lowest rate for boroughs and coun- 
ties was ten pounds. 

But for the next few years all recollection of emanci- 
pation on the one hand, and disenfranchisement on the 
other, was to be swallowed up in a struggle which has 
passed into history as the Irish Tithe War. The Eng- 
lish Church was established in Ireland against the will 
of the enormous majority of the Irish people, and they 
were compelled to pay tithes to maintain the obnoxious 
establishment. Sidney Smith declared that there was 
no abuse like this in Timbuctoo, and he estimated that 
probably a million of lives had been sacrificed in Ireland 
to the collection of tithes. They had to be wrung from 
the reluctant people at the point of the bayonet, and 
often enough by musket volleys. There were naturally 
incessant riots. The clergymen of the Established 
Church had to call in the services of an army, and 
appeal to the strategies and menaces of miniature war 
to obtain their tithes from the harassed followers of 
another faith. Such a state of things could not last 
long. In the end a general strike against the payment 
of tithes was organized, and then not all the king's 
horses nor all the king's men could have enforced their 
payment. In 1833 the arrears of tithes exceeded a mil 
lion and a quarter of money. There was in Ireland an 
army almost as great as that which held India. In 1833 
it had cost more than a million to maintain this army, 
with ;^3oo,ooo more for the police force, and the Gov- 
ernment had spent ;2^26,ooo to collect ^^^i 2,000 of tithes. 
For many years successive English ministers and states- 
men made efforts to deal with the Tithes Question; but 
it was not until 1838, a yf&r after Queen Victoria came 



90 AI^ OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

to the throne, that a Bill was passed by Lord John Rus- 
sell, which converted tithes into a rent charge, recover- 
able from the landlord instead of from the tenant. The 
tenant had practically still to pay the tithes in increased 
rent to his landlord, but it was no longer levied from 
him directly as tithes, and by the ministers of the Es- 
tablished Church; that was the only difference. It only 
exasperated the existing discontent. The agitation 
turned against rent, now that the rent meant tithes as 
well. Secret societies increased. A landlord, Lord 
Norbury, was assassinated, and the assassins were never 
discovered, though the country was under severe Co- 
ercion Acts. 

In the year 1845 there was fierce discussion in Eng- 
land over the Maynooth grant. Some time before the 
Union a Government grant had been made to the Ro- 
man Catholic college at Maynooth, where young men 
who wished to become priests were educated. But the 
old grant was insufficient, and Sir Robert Peel increased 
it in the teeth of the most violent opposition, not merely 
from his political opponents, but from many who were 
on other matters his political partizans. Mr. Gladstone 
resigned his place in the Ministry rather than counte- 
nance the increased Maynooth grant. For years and 
years after, annual motions were made in the House of 
Commons for the withdrawal of the grant, and wearily 
debated until the abolition of the State Church in Ire- 
land abolished the grant too and ended the matter. 
Peel also established the Queen's Colleges of Cork, 
Belfast, and Gal way, for purely secular teaching, which 
came to be known in consequence as the Godless Col- 
leges. These colleges pleased neither Catholics nor 
Protestants. The Catholics argued that there were uni- 
versities which gave Protestants religious as well as 
secular education, and that the Catholics should be al- 
lowed something of the same kind. Still the new scheme 
at least allowed Catholics an opportunity of obtaining 
a university education and winning university degrees. 
Up to that time no Irishman of the religion of his race 
could win any of the honours that the universities of 
Ireland offered which were worth winning. He might 



EMMET. O' COM NELL. 9 1" 

indeed enter their gates and sit at the feet of their 
teachers, but so long as he was a Catholic he could prac- 
tically reap no rewards for his scholarship. 

O'Connell's success in winning Catholic emancipation 
inspired him with the desire to bring about the repeal 
of the Union, and it did not seem to him and his fol- 
lowers that the difficulties in the way were any greater 
than those which had showed so terrible when Catholic 
Emancipation was first demanded, and which had been 
triumphantly overcome. 

There was a great deal against the agitation. To 
begin with, the country was very poor. ' Every class of 
the community,' says Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, 'were 
poorer than the corresponding class in any country in 
Europe.' The merchants, who had played a prominent 
part in political life since the Union, were now wearied 
and despairing of all agitation, and held aloof; the Prot- 
estant gentry were, for the most part, devoted to the 
Union; many of the Catholic gentry disliked O'Connell 
himself and his rough wild ways; many of O'Connell's 
old associates in the Catholic Emancipation movement 
had withdrawn from him to join the Whigs. In Eng- 
land the most active dislike of O'Connell prevailed. 
The Pericles or the Socrates of Aristophanes, the roy- 
alists drawn by Camille Desmoulins, were not gro- 
tesquer caricatures than the representation of O'Connell 
by English opinion and the English press. 

But on the other hand there was much for O'Connell. 
It might be said of him as of Wordsworth's Toussaint 
rOuverture, that 'his friends were exultations, agonies, 
and love, and man's unconquerable mind.' The people 
were with him, the people to whose sufferings he ap- 
pealed, the people for whom he had secured the Catho- 
lic Emancipation, and who regarded him as almost in- 
vincible. He was a great orator, endowed with a 
wonderful voice, which he could send in all its strength 
and sweetness to the furthest limits of the vastest 
crowd that ever came together to hear him speak. 
Lord Lytton declared that he first learned 

'What spells of infinite choice 
To rouse or lull has the sweet human voice,' 



92 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

when he heard O'Connell speak, and that in watching 
him governing with his genius and his eloquence one 
of his great meetings, he learned 

' To seize the sudden clue, 
To the grand troublous life antique, to view 
Under the rock stand of Demosthenes 
Unstable Athens heave her stormy seas.' 

It was not unnatural that O'Connell should have been 
carried away by his triumph and the homage his coun- 
try gave him everywhere into the belief that the repeal 
of the Union was to be as easily accomplished by the 
strong man and the determined nation as the emanci- 
pation of the Catholics. 

During the years of disturbance and repression, 
O'Connell had let the demand for repeal lie compara- 
tively quiet, but it was gradually gaining strength and 
popularity throughout the country. It was supported 
at first by the Nation newspaper. In 1843 the Repeal 
Association was founded; O'Connell contrived to enlist 
in its ranks Father Mathevv, and the large number of 
followers Father Mathew was daily winning over to the 
cause of total abstinence. 

'The year 1843,' said O'Connell, 'is and shall be the 
great repeal year.' The prediction was vain; forty 
years have gone by, and still the Union holds; O'Con- 
nell had Ireland at his back; he convened gigantic 
meetings where every word of his wonderful voice was 
treasured as the utterance of a prophet; but when the 
agitation had reached a height which seemed danger- 
ous to the Government, and made them, decide to put 
it down, his power was over. He would sanction no 
sort of physical force, no opposition other than con- 
stitutional opposition to the Government. The Gov- 
ernment proclaimed his meetings and put him into 
prison; he was soon set free, but his reign was over. 
Fierce spirits had risen in his place, men who scornfully 
repudiated the abnegation of physical force. Broken 
in health, O'Connell turned to Rome, and died on the 
way, at Genoa, on May 15th, 1847. Many recent political 
writers have been at the pains to glorify O'Connell at 



EMMET. 0' CON NELL. 93 

the expense of later leaders. It is instructive to re- 
member that in O'Connell's life-time, and for long 
after, he was the object of political hatred and abuse, 
no less unsparing than any that has assailed his suc- 
cessors in Irish popularity. 

The condition of Ireland at the time of O'Connell's 
death was truly desperate. From 1845 to 1847 a terri- 
ble famine had been literally laying the country waste. 
The chief, indeed practically the only food of the Irish 
peasantry then, as now, was the potato, and a failure 
of the potato crop meant starvation. ' But what,' says 
Carlyle in his French Revolution, 'if history some- 
where on this planet were to hear of a nation, the third 
soul of whom had not for thirty weeks each year as 
many third rate potatoes as would sustain him 1 His- 
tory, in that case, feels bound to consider that starva- 
tion is starvation; that starvation from age to age pre- 
supposes much; History ventures to assert that the 
French Sansculotte of '93, who, roused from long death- 
sleep could rush at once to the frontiers, and die fight- 
ing for an immortal hope and faith of deliverance for 
him and his, was but the second miserablest of men! 
The Irish Sans-potato, had he not senses then, nay, a 
soul ? In his frozen darkness it was bitter for him to 
die famishing, bitter to see his children famish.' 

In 1845, 1846, and in 1847, the potato crop had failed, 
and for the time the country seemed almost given over 
to hunger and to death. Thousands died miserably 
from starvation; thousands fled across the seas, seeking 
refuge in America, to hand down to their children and 
their children's children, born in the American Repub- 
lic, a bitter recollection of the misery they had endured, 
and the wrongs that had been inflicted upon them. When 
the famine was at an end it was found that Ireland had 
lost two millions of population. Before the famine she 
had eight millions, now she had six. All through the 
famine the Government had done nothing; private 
charity in England, in America, even in Turkey, had 
done something, and done it nobly, to stay the desola- 
tion and the dissolution that the famine was causing. 
But the Government, if it could not appease the famine, 



94 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

showed itself active in devising Coercion Bills to put 
down any spirit of violence which misery and starvation 
might haply have engendered in the Irish people. 

Such was the condition of the country when O'Con- 
nell and the Repeal Movement died together, and when 
the Young Ireland Movement, with its dream of armed 
rebellion, came into existence. 



YOUNG IRELAND— FENIANISM. 95 



CHAPTER IX. 

YOUNG IRELAND — FENIANISM. 

The Nation newspaper was first published on the 13th 
October, 1842; it was founded by Gavan Duffy, John 
Blake Dillon, and Thomas Davis. Gavan Duffy was 
the editor, but he says himself, in his history of the 
movement, that Davis was their true leader. They 
were all young men; Davis was twenty-eight, Dillon 
twenty-seven, and Duffy twenty-six. Davis, says Sir 
Charles Gavan Duffy, 'was a man of middle stature, 
strongly but not coarsely built .... a broad brow and 
strong jaw stamped his face with a character of power; 
but except when it was lighted by thought or feeling, 
it was plain and even rugged.' In his boyhood, he was 
*shy, retiring, unready, and self-absorbed,' was even 
described as 'a dull child ' by unappreciative kinsfolk. 
At Trinity College he was a wide and steady reader, 
who was chiefly noted by his fellow students for his 
indifference to rhetorical display. He was auditor of 
the Dublin Historical Society, had made some name for 
himself by his contributions to a magazine called the 
Citizen, and was a member of the Repeal Association. 
When Duffy made John Dillon's acquaintance, Dillon 
was * tall, and strikingly handsome, with eyes like a 
thoughtful woman's, and the clear olive complexion 
and stately bearing of a Spanish nobleman.' He had 
been designed for the priesthood, but had decided to 
adopt the bar. Like Davis, he loved intellectual pur- 
suits, and was a man of wide and varied learning. 
* Under a stately and somewhat reserved demeanour lay 
latent the simplicity and joyfulness of a boy; no one 
was readier to laugh with frank cordiality, or to give 
and take the pleasant banter which lends a relish to the 
friendship of young men.' Long years after, Thack- 
eray said of him to Gavan Duffy, that the modesty and 



96 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

wholesome sweetness of John Dillon gave him a fore- 
most place among the half dozen men in the United 
States whom he loved to remember. 

The success of the Nation was extraordinary. Its 
political teachings, its inspiring and vigorous songs and 
ballads, the new lessons of courage and hope which it 
taught, the wide knowledge of history possessed by its 
writers, — all combined to make it welcome to thousands. 
The tradesmen in town and the country peasants read 
it, and were animated by the story of their old historic 
island into the belief that she had a future, and that the 
future was close at hand, and that they were to help to 
make it. It was denounced by the Tory press as the 
organ of a hidden ' French party.' From France itself 
came words of praise worth having from two Irish offi- 
cers in the French service. One was Arthur O'Connor, 
the Arthur O'Connor of '98; the other was Miles Byrne, 
who had fought at Wexford. O'Connell became 
alarmed at the growing popularity of the Nation. At 
first it had strongly supported him: he had even writ- 
ten a Repeal Catechism in its pages; but its young men 
had the courage to think for themselves, and to criticize 
even the deeds and words of the Liberator. More and 
more young men clustered around the writers of the 
Nation; brilliant young essayists, politicians, poets. 
Gifted women wrote for the Nation, too — Lady Wilde, 
* Speranza,' chief among them. The songs published 
in a volume called ' The Spirit of the Nation,' became 
immediately very popular. As the agitation grew, 
Peel's Government became more threatening. O'Con- 
nell, in most of his defiant declarations, evidently 
thought that Peel did not dare to put down the organi- 
zation for Repeal, or he would never have challenged 
him as he did; for O'Connell never really meant to re- 
sort to force at any time. But the few young men who 
wrote for the Nation, and the many young men who 
read the Nation, were really prepared to fight if need be 
for their liberties. Nor did they want foreign sympathy 
to encourage them. In the United States vast meetings, 
organized and directed by men like Seward and Horace 
Gi'celey, threatened England with ' the assured loss of 



YOUNG IRELAND— FENIANISM. 97 

Canada by American arms,' if she suppressed the Re- 
peal agitation by force; and later Horace Greeley was 
one of a Directory in New York for sending ofificers 
and arms to Ireland. In France, the Republican Party 
were loud in their expressions of sympathy for the 
Irish, and Ledru Rollin had declared that France was 
ready to lend her strength to the support of an oppressed 
nation. No wonder the leaders of the National Party 
were encouraged in the belief that their cause was 
pleasing to the fates. 

A new man now began to come forward as a promi- 
nent figure in Irish politics, Mr. William Smith O'Brien, 
Member of Parliament for Limerick county. He was 
a country gentleman of stately descent, a direct descend- 
ant of Brian Boroimhe, a brother of Lord Inchiquin. 
He was a high-minded and honourable gentleman, with 
his country's cause deeply at heart. Davis described 
him as the ' most extravagant admirer of the Nation I 
have ever met.' Another prominent man was John 
Mitchel, the son of an Ulster Unitarian minister. When 
O'Connell's vast agitation fell to pieces after the sup- 
pression of the meeting of Clontarf, and the subsequent 
imprisonment of O'Connell showed that the Liberator 
did not mean ever to appeal to the physical force he 
had talked about, these two men became the leaders of 
different sections of the Young Ireland Party, as the 
men of the iW?//*?;? were now called. Thomas Davis, the 
sweet chief singer of the movement, died suddenly be- 
fore the movement which he had done so much for had 
taken direct revolutionary shape. Mitchel came on the 
Nation in his place, and advocated Revolution and Re- 
publicanism. He followed the traditions of Emmet and 
the men of '98; he was in favour of independence. Plis 
doctrines attracted the more ardent of the Young Ire- 
landers, and what was known as a war party was 
formed. There were now three sections of Irish agita- 
tion. There were the Repealers, who were opposed to 
all physical force; there were the moderate Young Ire- 
landers, only recognising physical force when all else 
had failed in the last instance; and there were now this 
new party who saw in revolution the only remedj for 



98 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Ireland. Smith O'Brien was bitterly opposed to Mitch- 
el's doctrines. Mitchel withdrew from \h^ Nation 2svdi 
started a paper of his own, the United Irishman, in which 
he advocated them more fiercely than ever. But though 
most of the Young Irelanders were not so extreme as 
Mitchel, the great majority of them talked, wrote, and 
thought revolution. In passionate poems and eloquent 
speeches they expressed their hatred of tyranny and 
their stern resolve to free their country by brave deeds 
rather than by arguments. They had now a brilliant 
orator among them, Thomas Francis Meagher, * a young 
man,' says Mr. Lecky, ' whose eloquence was beyond 
comparison superior to that of any other rising speaker 
in the country, and who, had he been placed in circum- 
stances favourable to the development of his talent, 
might perhaps, at length, have taken his place among 
the great orators of Ireland.' Meagher had early en- 
deared himself to the impetuous and gifted young men 
with whom he was allied, by a brilliant speech against 
O'Connell's doctrine of passive resistance. ' I am not 
one of those tame moralists,' the young man exclaimed, 
' who say that liberty is not worth one drop of blood. 
. . . Against this miserable maxim the noble virtue that 
has saved and sanctified humanity appears in judgment. 
From the blue waters of the Bay of Salamis; from the 
valley over which the sun stood still and lit the Israel- 
ites to victory; from the cathedral in which the sword 
of Poland has been sheathed in the shroud of Kosciusko; 
from the Convent of St. Isidore, where the fiery hand 
that rent the ensign of St. George upon the plains of 
Ulster has mouldered into dust; from the sands of the 
desert, where the wild genius of the Algerine so long 
has scared the eagle of the Pyrenees; from the ducal 
palace in this kingdom, where the memory of the gal- 
lant and seditious Geraldine enhances more than royal 
favour the splendour of his race; from the solitary grave 
within this mute city which a dying bequest has left 
without an epitaph — oh! from every spot where heroism 
has had a sacrifice or a triumph, a voice breaks in upon 
the cringing crowd that cherishes this maxim, crying, 
"Away with it — away with it."' The year 1848, the 



YOUNG IRELAND— FENIANISM. 99 

year of unfulfilled revolutions, when crowns were fall- 
ing and kings flying about in all directions, might well 
have seemed a year of happy omen for a new Irish re- 
bellion. But the Young Irelanders were not ready for 
rebellion when their plans were made known to Gov- 
ernment, and the Government struck at them before 
they could do anything. Mitchel was arrested, tried, 
and transported to Bermuda. That was the turning- 
point of the Revolution. The Mitchelites wished to 
rise in rescue. They urged, and rightly urged, that if 
revolution was meant at all, then was the time. But 
the less extreme men held back. An autumnal rising 
had been decided upon, and the}'' were unwilling to an- 
ticipate the struggle. They carried their point. Mitch- 
el was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. 
When the verdict was delivered he declared that, like the 
Roman Scaevola, he could promise hundreds who would 
follow his example, and as he spoke he pointed to John 
Martin, Meagher, and others of the associates who were 
thronging the galleries of the court. A wild cry came 
up from all his friends, 'Promise for me, Mitchel — 
promise for me! ' With that cry ringing in his ears he 
was hurried from the court, heavily ironed and encir- 
cled by a little army of dragoons, to the war-sloop 
Shearwater, that had been waiting for the verdict and 
the man. As the war-sloop steamed out of Dublin har- 
bour the hopes of the Young Irelanders went with her, 
vain and evanescent, from that hour forth, as the smoke 
that floated in the steamer's wake. Mitchel had him- 
self discountenanced, to his undying honour, any at- 
tempt at rescue. There is a pathetic little story which 
records his looking out of the prison-van that drove him 
from the court, and seeing a great crowd and asking 
where they were going, and being told that they were 
going to a flower-show. There were plenty of men in 
the movement who would have gladly risked every- 
thing to try and rescue Mitchel. But nothing could 
have been done without unanimity, and the too great 
caution of the leaders prevented the effort at the only 
moment when it could have had the faintest hope of 
success. From that hour the movement was doomed. 



lOO AJV OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Men who had gone into the revolution heart and soul 
might then have said of Smith O'Brien, as Menas in 
'Antony and Cleopatra ' says to Pompey, * For this I'll 
never follow thy pall'd fortunes more. Who seeks and 
will not take when once 'tis offered, shall never find it 
more.' The supreme moment of danger thus passed 
over, the Government lost no time in crushing out all 
that was left of the insurrection. Smith O'Brien, 
Meagher and Dillon went down into the country, and 
tried to raise an armed rebellion. There was a small 
scuffle with the police in a cabbage-garden at Ballin- 
garry, in Tipperary; the rebels were dispersed, and the 
rebellion was over. Smith O'Brien, Meagher and 
others were arrested and condemned to death. Meagh- 
er's speech from the dock was worthy of his rhetori- 
cal genius. ' I am not here to crave with faltering lip 
the life I have consecrated to the independence of my 

country I offer to my country, as some proof of 

the sincerity with which I have thought and spoken and 

struggled for her, the life of a young heart The 

history of Ireland explains my crime and justifies it. 
.... Even here, where the shadows of death surround 
me, and from which I see my early grave opening for 
me in no consecrated soil, the hope which beckoned me 
forth on that perilous sea whereon I have been wrecked, 
animates, consoles, enraptures me. No, I don't despair 
of my poor old country, her peace, her liberty, her 
glory!' 

The death sentence was commuted to transportation 
for life, and some years after Mitchel and Meagher suc- 
ceeded in escaping from Australia, and later on Smith 
O'Brien was pardoned, and died in Wales in 1854. 
Mitchel was elected to the House of Commons years 
after, and was not allowed to sit, and died whilst the 
question was still pending. Meagher fought bravely 
for the cause of the North in the American Civil War, 
and died ingloriously, drowned in the muddy waters 
of the Missouri. Gavan Duffy was tried three times, 
but could not be convicted. He afterwards sat for 
some time in Parliament, and then went into voluntary 
exile, to find fame and fortune in Victoria. For six- 



YOUNG IRELAND— FENIANISM. lOI 

teen years the country was politically quiet. A vain 
attempt was made in 1849, after all the Young Ireland 
leaders had fled or been sent into exile, to revive the 
agitation and re-create the insurrection. A few abortive - 
local risings there were, and nothing more. Stai'va- 
tion and misery forced the people into steady and in- 
cessant emigration. Eviction was in full swing, and 
between eviction and emigration it is estimated that 
almost a million of people left Ireland between 1847 
and 1857. *In a few 3'^ears more,' said the Times exult- 
ingly, 'a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara 
as is the Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.' That 
the Times was not a true prophet was no fault of the 
majority of the Irish landlords. Evictions took place 
by the hundred, by the thousand, by the ten thousand. 
Winter or summer, day or night, fair or foul weather, 
the tenants were ejected. Sick or well, bedridden or 
dying, the tenants, men, women or children, were 
turned out for the rents they had not paid, for the 
rents which in those evil days of famine and failure 
they could not pay. They might go to America if they 
could; they might die on the roadstead if so it pleased 
them. They were out of the hut, and the hut was un- 
roofed that they might not seek its shelter again, and 
that was all the landlord cared about. The expiring 
evicted tenant might, said Mitchel, raise his dying eyes 
to heaven and bless his God that he perished under the 
finest constitution in the world. It is hardly a matter 
of surprise, however much of regret and reprobation, 
that the lives of the evicting landlords should often be 
in peril, and often be taken. The English farmer, the 
English cottier, have happily no idea of the horror of 
evictions In Ireland as they prevailed in the years that 
followed the famine of 1847, as they had always pre- 
vailed, as they prevail still. 

Many of the landlords themselves were in no envia- 
ble condition. Mortgages and settlements of all kinds, 
the results of their own or their ancestors' profuseness, 
hung on their estates and made many a stately-show- 
ing rent-roll the merest simulacrum of tei'ritorial 
wealth. Even rack rents could not enable many of the 



102 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

landlords to keep their heads above water. At length 
the English Government made an effort to relieve their 
condition by passing the Encumbered Estates Act, by 
means of which a landlord or his creditors might peti- 
tion to have an estate sold in the Court established for 
that purpose under the Act. In 1858, by a supplement- 
ary Irish Landed Estates Act, the powers of the Court 
were increased to allow the sale of properties that were 
not encumbered. 

The tenant wanted legislation as well as the landlord, 
and in August, 1850, those who sympathized with the 
tenant's cause began to agitate for legislation. A con- 
ference was called by Dr. (afterwards Sir) John Gray, 
the Protestant owner of the F/-eeman's Journal, by the 
Presbyterian barrister Mr. Greer, who later represented 
Derry in Parliament, and by Frederick Lucas, the 
Catholic owner of the Tablet. A conference of men of 
all classes and creeds was held in Dublin — a conference 
Mr. Bright then called it in the House of Commons 
'of earnest men from all parts of Ireland,' and a ten- 
ant league was started. Everything was against the 
league. The indifference of England, the prostration 
of the country after the famine and the rebellion, the 
apathy, even the hostility of the Irish Liberal Members, 
were all combined against it. Then came the reor- 
ganization of the Catholic Church in England, and Lord 
John Russell's 'Durham Letter,' which for the time 
made any political alliance between Catholic and 
Protestant impossible. But when, in 1852, the Whig 
Ministry went out and Lord Derby, coming in with the 
Tories, dissolved Parliament, the chance of the tenant 
leaguers came. Some fifty tenant-right Members were 
elected. There was a Tenant Right Party in the House 
of Commons, 'the Irish Brigade' it came to be called, 
but it did little good to the cause of tenant right. Its 
leader was the once famous John Sadleir; his lieuten- 
ants were his brother James, Mr. William Keogh, and 
Mr. Edmond O' Flaherty; these men were all adventur- 
ers and most of them swindlers. For a time they de- 
ceived the Irish people by their professions and protes- 
tations. The Sadleirs owned the Tipperary Bank, one 



VOtJNG IRELAND— PENiANISM. IO3 

of the most popular banks in Ireland; they had plenty 
of money, and spent it lavishly; they started a paper, 
the Telegraph, to keep them before the public; they 
were good speakers, and the)^ led good speakers; they 
were demonstratively Catholic, and for a time a good 
many people believed in them, though they were of 
course distrusted by most intelligent Irishmen. 

In November Lord Derby went out of office and 
Whig Lord Aberdeen came in, and the leaders of the 
noisy, blatant brass band took office under him. John 
Sadleir became a Lord of the Treasury; Keogh was 
made Irish Solicitor-General; O'Flaherty Commission- 
er of Income Tax. There was fierce indignation, but 
they kept their places and their course for a time. 
Then they broke up. John Sadleir had embezzled, 
swindled, forged; he ruined half Ireland with his 
fraudulent bank; he made use of his position under 
Government to embezzle public money; he committed 
suicide. His brother was expelled from the House of 
Commons; he fled the country and was heard of no 
more. O'Flaherty hurried to Denmark, where there 
was no extradition treaty, and then to New York, 
Keogh, the fourth of this famous quadrilateral, their 
ally, their intimate, their faithful friend, contrived to 
keep himself clear of the crash. He was immediately 
made a judge, and was conspicuous for the rest of his 
life for his unfailing and unaltering hostility to any 
and every Irish national party. 

Once again there was a period of political apathy, as 
far as constitutional agitation was concerned. But the 
'48 rebellion had left rebellious seed behind it. Even 
as the United Irishmen had generated Repeal, and 
Repeal Young Ireland, so Young Ireland generated the 
Phoenix Conspiracy, and the Phoenix Conspiracy soon 
grew into the Fenian Brotherhood, a vast organization 
with members in all parts of the world, with money at 
its disposal, and more money, with soldiers trained by 
the American Civil War. Irish Americans steadily 
promulgated the cause in Ireland, and prepared for the 
rising. The Fenians in America invaded Canada on 
the 31st May, 1866, occupied Fort Erie, defeated the 



104 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Canadian volunteers, and captured some flags. But 
the United States interfered to enforce the neutrality 
of their frontier, arrested most of the leaders, and ex- 
tinguished the invasion. The Fenians in England 
planned the capture of Chester Castle; the scheme was 
to seize the arms in the castle, to hasten on to Holy- 
head, to take possession of such steamers as might be 
there, and invade Ireland before the authorities in Ire- 
land could be prepared for the blovi^; but the plan was 
betrayed and failed. Then in March, 1867, an attempt 
at a general rising was made in Ireland, and failed 
completely; the very elements fought against it. Snow, 
rare in Ireland, fell incessantly, and practically buried 
the rising in its white shroud. Large numbers of pris- 
oners were taken in England and Ireland and sentenced 
to penal servitude. In Manchester two Fenian prison- 
ers were released from the prison van by some armed 
Fenians, and in the scuffle a policeman was killed. For 
this, three of the rescuers, Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien, 
were hanged. Mr. John Stuart Mill and Mr. Bright 
strove hard to save their lives, with all the eloquence 
and all the influence they could bring to bear. Mr. 
Swinburne addressed a noble and equally unsuccessful 
poetic ' Appeal ' to England to ' put forth her strength, 
and release,' for which his name should be held in 
eternal honour by the people of Ireland. 

A little later a wicked and foolish attempt was made 
to blow up the Clerkenwell Prison in order to set free 
some imprisoned Fenians. It failed to do this, but it 
killed some innocent persons, and its .perpetrator was 
hanged. 

But the succession of these events had convinced a 
statesman, who came into power shortly after, that the 
condition of Ireland urgently called for remedial legis- 
lation. The Parliament which met at the close of 1868, 
under Mr. Gladstone's leadership in the House of Com- 
mons, was known to be prepared to deal with some of 
the most pressing of Irish questions; of these the fore- 
most was the Irish State Church. It is not necessary 
to enter at any length into the history of the manner in 
which Mr. Gladstone accomplished the disestablish- 



YOUNG IRELAND— FENIANISM. IO5 

ment and the disendowment of the State Church in 
Ireland. It is sufficient here to record the fact that it 
was disestablished and disendowed. For centuries it 
had been one of the bitterest emblems of oppression in 
Ireland. In a country of which the vast majority were 
Catholic, it had been, in the words of Lord Sherbrooke, 
then Mr. Lowe, ' kept alive with the greatest difficulty 
and at the greatest expense.' It was an exotic with the 
curse of barrenness upon it, and Mr. Lowe called upon 
the Government to ' cut it down; why cumbereth it the 
ground ?' The Government replied to the appeal, and 
the State Church in Ireland ceased to exist. This done, 
Mr. Gladstone turned his attention to the Irish Land 
Question, a very pressing question indeed. 



I06 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE LAND QUESTION. 

In all the melancholy chronicles of Irish misery and 
disaffection, and of unsuccessful English measures to 
remedy the misery and to coerce the disaffection, the 
land plays an important part. 

After the incessant confiscations and settlements of 
Irish soil, the vast majority of the Irish people were 
reduced to the condition of mere tenants-at-will of 
landlords who were either foreigners in fact or in sym- 
pathy. The majority of the landlords were actuated 
only by the desire to get as high a price as they could 
for their land, and the need of land was so imperative 
to the Irish peasant, who had nothing but the land to 
live upon, that he was ready to take any terms, no 
matter how terrible. Of course, he could not often pay 
the terms exacted. The rack-rent begot the eviction, 
and the eviction begot the secret societies, the Ribbon 
lodges, which the Irish peasant began to look upon as 
his sole protection against landlord tyranny. What ex- 
actly were these Ribbon lodges, which are so often 
named in all accounts of the Irish Land Question ? For 
more than half a century the Ribbon Society has ex- 
isted in Ireland, and even yet it is impossible to say for 
certain how it began, how it is organized, and what are 
its exact purposes. Its aim seems to have been chiefly 
to defend the landserf from the landlord, but it often 
had a strong political purpose as well. Mr. A. M. Sul- 
livan, in his ' New Ireland,' states that he long ago 
satisfied himself that the Ribbonism of one period was 
not the Ribbonism of another, and that the version of 
its aims and character prevalent amongst its members 
in one part of Ireland often differed widely from those 
professed in some other part of the country. 'In Ulster 
it professed to be a defensive or retaliatory league 



THE LAND QUESTION. lO/ 

against Orangeism; in Munster it was at first a com- 
bination against tithe-proctors; in Connaughit it was 
an organization against rack-renting and evictions; in 
Leinster it was often mere trade-unionism, dictating by 
its mandates and enforcing b}^ its vengeance the em- 
ployment or dismissal of workmen, stewards, and even 
domestics.' All sorts of evidence and information of 
the most confused kind lias been from time to timie 
given with respect to Ribbonism, much of it the merest 
fiction. All that is certain is that it and many other 
formidable defensive organiza-^ons existed among the 
peasantry of different parts of Ireland. 

Perhaps Ireland was the only country in the world 
in which a man had nothing to gain by improving the 
land he lived upon. If he improved it, he was certain 
in nine cases out of ten to have his rent raised upon 
him as a reward for his labour. He was absolutely at 
the mercy, or rather the want of mercy, of his landlord, 
whom he perhaps had never seen, for many of the land- 
lords were absentees, living out of Ireland on the money 
they took from the country. The Irish peasant's mis- 
ery did not pass altogether unnoticed. Ever since the 
Union, Select Committees had again and again reported 
the distress in the fullest manner. Too often the re- 
port was left to lie in bulky oblivion upon the dusty 
shelves of State libraries, or was answered by a coer- 
cive measure. No attempt was made for many years 
to feed the famished peasant or to relieve the evicted 
tenant. Legislation only sought to make sure that 
while their complaints were unheeded their hands 
should be stayed from successful revenge. The great- 
est concession that Government made for many genera- 
tions to the misery of the Irish tenant was to pass an 
Act prohibiting evictions on Christmas Day and Good 
Friday, and enacting that the roof of a tenant's house 
should not be pulled off until the inmates had left. 

A Select Committee was appointed in 1819, under 
the presidency of Sir John Newton, which reported on 
the great misery of the labouring poor, and unavail- 
ingly urged agricultural refoi-m, especially advising the 
reclamation of waste lands. Another Committee re- 



I08 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

ported in 1823 that the condition of the people was 
miserable, and also unsuccessfully urged the impor- 
tance of some form of agricultural relief. Two years 
later, in 1825, a fresh Select Committee gave fresh evi- 
dence as to the misery of the country, and made fresh 
suggestions that something should be done for the 
Irish tenant, and, as before, nothing was done. The 
Act of 1793, giving every forty shilling freeholder a 
vote, had indirectly injured the people, as the land- 
lords leased small patches of land to increase their 
political power. The Emancipation Act of 1829, 
abolishing the vote of the forty shilling freeholder, re- 
moved with it the landlord's interest in srf all holdings, 
and so again caused misery to the people by its intro- 
duction of the system of clearances. In 1829 the condi- 
tion of the tenant farmers and labouring classes of 
Ireland was brought forcibly under the notice of the 
Government by Mr. Brownlow, who went so far as to 
ask leave to bring in a Bill to facilitate the reclamation 
of waste lands. The Bill passed the Commons, and 
was read a second time in the Lords. It was then re- 
ferred to a Select Committee, and heard of no more. 
But, on the other hand, an Arms Bill, which an English 
peer was found to denounce as vexatious and aggres- 
sive, was successfully carried. In 1830 Mr. Henry 
Grattan, son of Ireland's great orator, and Mr. Spring 
Rice, afterwards Lord Monteagle, urged the sufferings 
of Ireland upon the Government, and strongly advo- 
cated the reclamation of waste lands. But nothing 
whatever was done beyond the appointment of a Select 
Committee. This Select Committee of 1830 had the 
same story to tell that all its unfortunate predecessors 
told. It appealed in vain. 

The valuation of Ireland was undertaken in 1830 on 
the recommendation of a Select Committee of the 
House of Commons in 1824. To ensure uniform valua- 
tion, an Act was passed in 1836 requiring all valuations 
of land to be based on a fixed scale of agricultural pro- 
duce contained in the Act. The valuators were in- 
structed to act in the same manner as if employed by a 
principal landlord dealing with a solvent tenant. The 



THE LAND QUESTION. I09 

average valuation proved to be about twenty-five per 
cent under the gross rental of the country. In 1844 a 
Select Committee of the House of Commons was ap- 
pointed to reconsider the question, and an Act passed 
in 1846 changed the principle of valuation from a rela- 
tive valuation of town lands based on a fixed scale of 
agricultural produce to a tenement valuation for poor 
law rating to be made 'upon an estimate of the net 
annual value .... of the rent, for which, one year 
with another, the same might in its actual state be rea- 
sonably expected to let from year to year.' The two 
valuations gave substantially the same results. In 
1852 another Valuation Act was passed, returning to 
the former principle of valuation by a fixed scale of 
agricultural produce; but Sir Richard Griffiths' evi- 
dence in 1869 shows the valuation employed was a 
'live-and-let-live valuation, according to the state of 
prices, for five years previous to ' the time of valuation. 
In 1830 famine and riot held hideous carnival. We 
learn from the speech from the throne that the King 
was determined to crush out sedition and disaffection 
by all the means which the law and the constitution 
placed at his disposal, but had no remedy to suggest for 
the poverty and distress of the disaffected people. In 
February, 183 1, Mr. Smith O'Brien asked leave to bring 
in a Bill for the relief of the poor, but got no hope or 
encouragement from the Government. At this time 
Mr. Hume attacked the Ministry for introducing a 
coercive Irish policy, which was in direct opposition to 
the promises of conciliation they had made while they 
were in opposition. On the 30th March, 1831, Lord 
Althorpe proposed a vote of ;^5o,ooo to be advanced to 
commissioners for expenditure on public works in Ire- 
land ; but its effect was counterbalanced four months 
later by the introduction oi Mr. Stanley's Arms Bill, 
which Lord Althorpe himself described as one of the 
most tyrannical measures he ever heard proposed. A 
Sub-letting Act, which was now under discussion, pro- 
hibited the letting of property by a lessee, unless with 
the express consent of the proprietor. According to 
Dr. Boyle, who attacked the Bill, so long as the rural 



no AN OUTLINE OF tRISi-I HISTORY. 

population had no better employment or sure chance of 
subsistence than the possession of a potato field, it was 
idle to expect them to submit to eviction from their 
miserable holdings. By this time the condition of Ire- 
land was truly desperate. Catholic Emancipation had 
indeed allowed Irish Catholic Members to sit in the 
House of Commons, but it disfranchised the forty shil- 
ling freeholders, and it gave the landlords greater 
opportunity for clearance. 

Government answered the discontent in 1831 by 
another Coercion Bill. In 1834 Mr. Poulett Scrope 
made an unsuccessful effort to do something for the 
Irish tenant. In 1S35 Mr. Sharman Crawford, then 
member for Dundalk, moved for leave to bring in a 
Bill to amend the law of landlord and tenant, and he 
reintroduced his measure on the loth March, 1836; he 
obtained leave to bring in a Bill, and that was the end 
of it. In 1837 Mr. Lynch asked leave to bring in a Bill 
on waste lands, and was as unsuccessful as Mr. Sharman 
Crawford. 

In 1842 the Irish Artificial Drainage Act did something 
towards the reclamation of v^^aste lands, which, however, 
was of little use until amended by the Summary Pro- 
ceedings Act of 1843. 1S43 is a memorable epoch in the 
history of the Irish land agitation. It was the year of 
the Devon Commission, which Sir Robert Peel appointed 
in answer to the repeated entreaties of Mr. Sharman 
Crawford. The evidence of the Devon Commission, in 
its two years' labours, showed, as all other Commissions 
had shown, that the condition of the Irish peasant was 
miserable in the extreme — that the fatal system of land 
tenure was the cause of the misery ; and urged that the 
tenant should be secured fair remuneration for his out- 
lay of capital and labour. Lord Devon was determined 
that, if he could help it, the Commission should not 
prove valueless. On the 6th May, 1845, he printed a 
number of petitions, urging Parliament to secure to in- 
dustrious tenants the benefits of their improvements. 
Lord Stanley replied by introducing a Compensation 
for Disturbance Bill in June, but he had to abandon it 
in July through the opposition of the Lords, the Com- 



THE LAND QUESTION. Ill 

mons, and the Select Committee to, whom it had been 
entrusted. Mr. Sharman Crawford then introduced the 
Tenant Right Bill, which he had kept back in 1843 ii^ 
order to await the result of the Devon Commission. In 
1846 Lord Lincoln, urged by Mr. Sharman Crawford, 
brought in a Compensation for Disturbance Bill, but 
the Ministry resigned before it came to a second read- 
ing, and so it was forgotten. On the loth June, 1847, 
Mr. Sharman Crawford's Tenant Right Bill was re- 
jected by a majority of eighty-seven. He brought it 
forward again in 1848, and it was defeated on the 5th 
April by a majority of twenty-three. In 1848 Sir 
William Somerville, as Irish Secretary, brought in a 
Bill which was practically the same as Lord Lincoln's 
measure of 1846. The Irish Members supported it. 
The report upon the Bill was not ready until too near 
the end of the Session to make any further progress 
with it, but the Government determined that Ireland 
should not want some legislation during the Session, 
and so they suspended the Habeas Corpus Act. In 
1849 Mr. Horsman urged unsuccessfully the presentation 
of an add-ress pointing out to Her Majesty the condition 
of Ireland. Early in 1850 Sir William Somerville rein- 
troduced his Bill, which was read a second time, given 
a Committee, and suffered to disappear. Mr. Sharman 
Crawford again unsuccessfully endeavoured to push 
forward his Tenant Right Bill. In 1851 Sir H. W. 
Barron's motion for a Committee of the whole House 
to inquire into the state of Ireland was negatived by a 
majority of nine. Nothing, therefore, had been done 
for the Irish tenant since the report of the Devon Com- 
mission. The Encumbered Estates Act had been 
passed for the Irish landlord. On the loth February, 
1852, Mr. Sharman Crawford obtained leave to bring in 
a Bill to regulate the Ulster custom. Then the Minis- 
try went out of office, and the Bill, on its second read- 
ing, was rejected by a majority of no, under Lord 
Derby's Conservative Government. The Government 
showed a disposition to do something in the Irish 
question. Mr. Napier, the Irish Attorney-General, 
drafted four Bills for regulating the relations of land- 



112 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

lord and tenant in* Ireland, a Land Improvement Bill, 
a Landlord and Tenant Law Consolidation Bill, a 
Leasing Powers Bill, and a Tenant's Improvements Com- 
pensation Bill. In 1853 the Committee appointed to 
consider Mr. Napier's Bills and Mr. Sharman Crawford's 
Bill rejected the latter measure, and considerably 
amended, to the disadvantage of the tenant, the fourth 
of Mr. Napier's measures. Since Mr. Napier had in- 
troduced them the Liberal party had come into power. 
Mr. Napier, though in Opposition, still did all he could 
to assist the passing of his own measures, but his Party 
fought bitterly against them. In 1854 the Bills were 
referred to a Select Committee of the House of Lords. 
The Tenant's Compensation Bill was condemned, and 
the other Bills sent down to the House of Commons 
without it. In 1855 Mr. Serjeant Shee endeavoured to 
bring in a Bill that was practically the same, as this re- 
jected measure, and the Government took charge of it 
only to abandon it before the opposition of the land- 
lords. Mr. Sharman Crawford's Tenant Bill was in 
consequence introduced again by Mr. George Henry 
Moore, the leader of the Irish Party, in 1856, but it had 
to be dropped in consequence of the opposition of the 
Government. It was again brought forward by Mr. 
Moore in 1857, and again withdrawn. In 1858 Mr. Ser- 
jeant Shee's Tenant Compensation Bill was reintroduced 
by Mr. John Francis Maguire, then leader of the Irish 
Party, and defeated by a majority of forty-five. The 
indifference of the Government at this time to the Irish 
question was made the more marked by the fact that 
the land question of Bengal had been settled in accord- 
ance with ancient principles of Indian law, which granted 
to the Indian subject much that was denied the Irish 
subject. In i860, however, the famous Land Act was 
passed which proved so unsatisfactory. The framers of 
the Act of i860 tried to simplify the relations of land- 
lord and tenant by sweeping away all remains of the 
feudal connection, and by establishing an absolute prin- 
ciple of free trade and freedom of contract as opposed 
to tenure. 

But the Act of i860 was a failure, in so far as it was 



THE LAND QUESTION. 113 

based upon that principle of freedom of contract 
which is wholly unsuited to the Irish Land Question. 
'The Irish circumstances and Irish ideas as to social 
and agricultural economy/ said John Stuart Mill, ' are 
the general ideas and circumstances of the human race. 
It is the English ideas and circumstances that are pecu- 
liar. Ireland is in the mid-stream of human existence 
and human feeling and opinion. It is England that is 
in one of the lateral channels.' 

To those who ask why the tenants take the land 
when they cannot fulfil their contract, the answer is, 
They cannot help themselves in what they do. The 
Irish cling to their land because all their other 
means of livelihood have been destroyed. They 
make the best terms they can, which, in truth, 
means bowing to whatever the master of the situation 
imposes. The freedom of contract argument has been 
very fairly disposed of by asking, ' Why does Parlia- 
ment regulate, or fix and limit, the price which a rail- 
way company charges for a travelling ticket? Why 
are not the contracting parties, the railway company 
and the traveller, left to settle between them how much 
the price in every particular case shall be ? ' It is because 
the law says they are not free contracting parties; the 
railway company has a monopoly of that which is in a 
sense a necessity to the traveller and others. Also, if 
the matter were left to contract, travellers would prac- 
tically have to give five shillings a mile if the company 
demanded it. The immediate effect of the Act was to 
produce an immense flood of emigration, and to create 
the Fenian Conspiracy. Mr. Chichester Fortescue's 
Bill of 1866, to amend that of i860, of course fell 
through. In 1867 the Tories brought in a fresh Bill, 
which was practically Lord Stanley's Bill of 1845, which 
had to be abandoned. In 1869 Mr. Gladstone came in, 
and on the 15th of February, 1870, he brought in his 
famous Bill to Amend the Law of Landlord and Ten- 
ant in Ireland, the first Bill that really did anything to 
carry out the recommendation of the Devon Commis- 
sion. But it did not really place the tenant beyond the 
vicious control of the landlord. It allowed him the priv- 



ii4 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

ilege of going to law with the landlord; and going to law 
in such a case generally meant the success of the man 
who was longest able to fight it out. The three objects 
of the Land Act of 1870 were first to obtain for the ten- 
ants in Ireland security of tenure; second, to encourage 
the making of improvements throughout the country, 
and third, to get a peasant proprietorship in Ireland. 
It made no alteration in the tenancies held under the 
Ulster tenant right custom, which it merely sanctioned 
and enforced against the landlords of estates subject to 
it. The Ulster custom consists of two chief features — 
permissive fixity of tenure, and the tenant's right to sell 
the goodwill of his farm. For a long time the hope of 
getting the Ulster custom transferred to the other prov- 
inces was almost the highest ambition of the Irish 
peasant. 

The framers of the Act of 1870 dared not state openly, 
and it was constantly denied, that the object of the new 
measure was to give the tenant any estate in the land, 
or to transfer to him any portion of the absolute owner- 
ship. Its principle of arrangement between landlord and 
tenant was described as a process by which bad land- 
lords were obliged to act as the good landlords did; 
but it might have been more justly styled an enactment 
by which the amusement of evicting tenants was made 
a monopoly of the wealthier proprietors. The principle 
of compensation for disturbance which it introduced 
was clumsy and imperfect, and the eight clauses whkh 
attempted to create a peasant proprietorship in Ireland 
were no more successful than the rest of the Bill. 'The 
cause of their failure is obvious,' says Mr. Richey, 'to 
anyone acquainted with the nature of the landed estates 
title which it was considered desirable for the tenant to 
obtain. A Landed Estates Court conveyance affects not 
only the rights of the parties to the proceedings, but 
binds persons, whether parties or not, and extinguishes 
all rights which are inconsistent with the terms of the 
grant by the Court. If by any mistake more lands than 
should properly be sold are included in the grant, or 
the most indisputable rights of third parties are not 
noticed in the body of the grant or the annexed sched- 



THE LAND QUESTION. II5 

ule, irreparable injustice is done and the injured parties 
have no redress.' The fact that the Court was not made 
the instrument for the perpetuation of the grossest 
frauds is due solely to the stringency of its rules and 
the intelligence of its officers. 

Interwoven with all these abortive land schemes and 
land measures was incessant uninterrupted coercive leg- 
islation. From 1796 to 1802 an Insurrection Act was 
in force, and from 1797 to 1802 the Habeas Corpus Act 
was suspended. From 1803 to 1805 the country was 
under martial law, and from the same year to 1806 Ha- 
beas Cprpus was suspended. Insurrection Acts were in 
force from 1807 to 1810, from 1814 to 1818, from 1822 
to 1825. Habeas Corpus was again suspended in 1822 
to 1S23. In 1829, in the debate on Catholic Emancipa- 
tion, Sir Robert Peel was able to say that 'for scarce!}'- 
a year during the period that has elapsed since the 
Union has Ireland been governed by the ordinary course 
of law.' From the date of that utterance to the present 
day the country has not been governed by the ordi- 
nary law for scarcely a single year. Arms Acts, sus- 
pensions of Habeas Corpus, changes of venue. Peace 
Preservation Acts, and coercive measures of all kinds, 
succeed, accompany, and overlap each other with mel- 
ancholy persistence. Roughly speaking, Ireland from 
the Union to 1880 was never governed by the ordinary 
law. The Union, according to its advocates, was to be 
the bond of lasting peace and affection between the 
two countries; it was followed by eighty 3^ears of coer- 
cive legislation. It was grimly fitting that the Union 
so unlawfully accomplished could only be sustained by 
the complete abandonment of all ordinary processes of 
law thereafter. 



Il6 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

CHAPTER XI. 

HOME RULE — THE LAND LEAGUE. 

For some years after the failure of the Fenian insur- 
rection there was no political agitation in Ireland; but 
in 1873 a new national movement began to make itself 
felt; this was the Home Rule Movement. It had been 
gradually formed since 1870 by one or two leading Irish- 
men, who thought the time was ripe for a new consti- 
tutional effort; chief among them was Mr. Isaac Butt, a 
Protestant, an eminent lawyer, and an earnest politician. 
The movement spread rapidly, and took a firm hold of 
the popular mind. After the General Election of 1874, 
some sixty Irish Members were returned who had stood 
before their constituencies as Home Rulers. The Home 
Rule demand is clear and simple enough; it asks for 
Ireland a separate Government, still allied with the Im- 
perial Government, on the principles which regulate 
the alliance between the United States of America.- The 
proposed Irish Parliament in College Green would bear 
just the same relation to the Parliament at Westmin- 
ster that the Legislature and Senate of every Americaa 
State bear to the head authority of the Congress in the 
Capitol at Washington. All that relates to local busi- 
ness it was proposed to delegate to the Irish Assembly; 
all questions of imperial policy were still to be left to 
the Imperial Government. There was nothing very 
startling, very daringly innovating, in the scheme. In 
most of the dependencies of Great Britain, Home Rule 
systems of some kind were already established. In 
Canada, in the Australasian Colonies, the principle 
might be seen at work upon a large scale; upon a small 
scale it was to be studied nearer home in the neighbour- 
ing Island of Man. One of the chief objections raised 
to the new proposal by those who thought it really 
worth while to raise any objections at all, was that it 
would be practically impossible to decide the border 



HOME RULE— THE LAND LEAGUE. 11/ 

line between local affairs and imperial affairs. The an- 
swer to this is, of course, that what has not been found 
impossible, or indeed exceedingly difficult, in the case 
of the American Republic and its component States, or 
in the case of England and her American and Austra- 
lasian Colonies, need not be found to present unsurpass- 
able difficulties in the case of Great Britain and Ire- 
land. 

' If the Home Rule theory,' says Mr. Lecky, ' brings 
with it much embarrassment to English statesmen, it is 
at least a theory which is within the limits of the con- 
stitution, which is supported by means that are per- 
fectly loyal and legitimate, and which, like every other 
theory, must be discussed and judged upon its merits.' 
This is exactly what English statesmen and politicians 
generally have refused to do. They will have none of • 
the Home Rule theory; they will not admit that it 
comes within the limits of a constitutional question; 
Home Rule never could and never shall be granted, and 
so what is the use of discussing it? This was certainly 
the temper in which Home Rule was at first received 
in and out of Parliament. Of late days, politicians who 
have come to concede the possibility, if not the prac- 
ticability of some system of local Government for Ire- 
land, still fight off the consideration of the question by 
saying, ' What is the use of discussing Home Rule until 
you who support it present us with a clear and defined 
plan for our consideration ? ' This form of argument is 
no less unreasonable than the other. The supporters 
of Home Rule very fairly say, ' We maintain the neces- 
sity for establishing a system of local Government in 
Ireland. That cannot be done without the Govern- 
ment; till, therefore, the Government is willing to ad- 
mit that Home Rule is a question to be entertained at 
all, it is no use bringing forward any particular plan; 
when it is once admitted that some system of Home 
Rule must be established in Ireland, then will be the 
time for bringing forward legislative schemes and plans, 
and out of the multiplicity of ideas and suggestions, 
creating a complete and cohesive whole.' The princi- 
ple of Home Rule obtains in every State of the Ameri- 



Il8 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

can Union, though the plan of Home Rule in each par- 
ticular State is widely different. The principle of Home 
Rule obtains in ever)'- great Colony of the Crown, but 
the plan pursued by each Colony is of a very different 
kind. When the people of the two countries have 
agreed together to allow Ireland to manage for herself 
her own local affairs, it will be very easy to bring for- 
ward some scheme exactly deciding the form which the 
conceded Home Rule is to take. But to bring forward 
the completed scheme before a common basis of nego- 
tiation has been established, would be more the duty 
of a new Abbe Sieyes, with a new 'theory of irregular 
verbs,' than of a practical and serious politician. 

At first the Home Rule Party was not very active. 
Mr. Butt used to have a regular Home Rule debate 
once every Session, when he and his followers stated 
their views, and a division was taken and the Home 
Rulers were of course defeated. Yet, while the English 
House of Commons was thus steadily rejecting year 
after year the demand made for Home Rule by the 
large majority of the Irish Members, it was affording a 
strong argument in favour of some system of local Gov- 
ernment, by consistently outvoting every proposition 
brought forward by the bulk of the Irish Members re- 
lating to Irish Questions. In 1874 it threw out the Irish 
Municipal Franchise Bill, the Irish Municipal Priv- 
ileges Bill, and the Bill for the purchase of Irish rail- 
ways. In 1875 it threw out the motion for inquiry into 
the working of the Land Act, the Grand Jury Reform 
Bill, the Irish Municipal Corporations Bill, the Munici- 
pal Franchise Bill. In 1876 it threw out the Irish Fish- 
eries Bill, the Irish Borough Franchise Bill, the Irish 
Registration of Voters Bill, and the Irish Land Bill. 
These were all measures purely relating to Irish affairs, 
which, had they been left to the decision of the Irish 
Members alone, would have been carried by overwhelm- 
ing majorities. The Irish vote in favour of these meas- 
ures was seldom less than twice as great as the oppos- 
ing votes; in some cases they were three times as great, 
in some cases they were four, seven, and eight times 
greater. 



HOME RULE— THE LAND LEAGUE. II9 

Mr. Butt and his followers had proved the force of 
the desire for some sort of National Government in 
Ireland, but the strength of the movement they had 
created now called for stronger leaders. A new man 
was coming into Irish political life who was destined 
to be the most remarkable Irish leader since O'Con- 
nell. 

Mr. Charles Stuart Parnell, who entered the House 
of Commons in 1875 as Member for Meath, was a de- 
scendant of the English poet Parnell, and of the two 
Parnells, father and son, John and Henry, who stood 
by Grattan to the last in the struggle against the Union. 
He was a grand-nephew of Sir Henry Parnell, the first 
Lord Congieton, the advanced Reformer and friend of 
Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne. He was Protestant, 
and a member of the Protestant Synod. Mr. Parnell 
set himself to form a party of Irishmen in the House of 
Commons who should be absolutely independent of any 
English political party, and ^vho would go their own 
way with only the cause of Ireland to influence them. 
Mr. Parnell had all the qualities that go to make a good 
political leader, and he succeeded in his purpose. The 
more advanced men in and out of Parliament began to 
look up to him as the real representative of the popular 
voice. In 1878 Mr. Butt died. He had done good ser- 
vice in his life; he had called the Irish Home Rule 
Party into existence, and he had done his best to form 
a cohesive Parliamentary Party. If his ways were not 
the ways most in keeping with the political needs of the 
hour, he was an honest and able politician, he was a 
sincere Irishman, and his name deserves grateful recol- 
lection in Ireland. The leadership of the Irish Parlia- 
mentary Party was given to Mr. William Shaw, Member 
for Cork County, an able, intelligent man, who proved 
himself in many ways a good leader. In quieter times 
his authority might have remained unquestioned, but 
these were unquiet times. The decorous and demure 
attitude of the early Home Rule Party was to be 
changed into a more aggressive action, and Mr. Parnell 
was the champion of the change. It was soon obvious 
that he was the real leader recognised by the majority 



120 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

of the Irish Home Rule Members, and b}^ the country 
behind them. 

Mr. Parnell and his following have been bitterly de- 
nounced for pursuing an obstructive policy. They are 
often written about as if they had invented obstruction; 
as if obstruction of the most audacious kind had never 
been practised in the House of Commons before Mr. 
Parnell entered it. It may perhaps be admitted that 
the Irish Members made more use of obstruction than 
had been done before their time, yet it should be re- 
membered that the early Irish obstruction was on Eng- 
lish measures, and was carried on with the active advice 
and assistance of English Members. The Tory Party 
were then in power, and the Advanced Liberals were 
found often enough voting with the Obstructionists in 
their fiercest obstruction to the existing Government. 
The Irish Party fought a good fight on the famous 
South African Bill, a fight which not a few Englishmen 
now would heartily wish had proved successful. It 
should also be remembered that Mi*. Parnell did some 
good service to English legislation; he worked hard to 
reform the Factories and Workshops Bill of 1878, the 
Prison Code and the Army and Navy Mutiny Bills. 
Many ofhis amendments were admitted to be of value; 
many in the end were accepted. His earnest efforts 
contributed in no small degree to the abolition of flog- 
ging in the army. 

The times undoubtedly were unquiet; the policy 
which was called in England obstructive and in Ireland 
active was obviously popular with the vast majority of 
the Irish people. The Land Question, too, was coming 
up again, and in a stronger form than ever. Mr. Butt, 
not very long before his death, had warned the House 
of Commons that the old land war was going to break 
out anew, and he was laughed at for his vivid fancy by 
the English Press and by English public opinion; but 
he proved a true prophet, Mr. Parnell had carefully 
studied the condition of the Irish tenant, and he saw 
that the Land Act of 1870, was not the last word of legis- 
lation on his behalf. Mr. Parnell was at first an ardent 
advocate of what came to be known as the Three F's, 



HOME RULE— THE LAND LEAGUE. 121 

fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. But the Three 
F's were soon to be put aside in favour of more ad- 
vanced ideas. Outside Parliament a strenuous and 
earnest man was preparing to inaugurate the greatest 
land agitation ever seen in Ireland. Mr. Michael Davitt 
was the son of an evicted tenant; his earliest youthful 
impressions had been of the miser)^ of the Irish peasant 
and the tyranny of the Irish landlord. The evicted ten- 
ant and his family came to England, to Lancashire. 
The boy Michael was put to work in a mill, where he 
lost his right arm by a machine accident. When he 
grew to be a young man he joined the Fenians, and in 
1870, on the evidence of an informer, he was arrested 
and sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude; seven 
years later he was let out on ticket-of-leave. In his 
long imprisonment he had thought deeply upon the po- 
litical and social condition of Ireland and the best 
means of improving it; when he came out he had aban- 
doned his dreams of armed rebellion, and he went in 
for constitutional agitation to reform the Irish land 
system. 

The land system needed reforming; the condition of 
the tenant was only humanly endurable in years of 
good harvest. The three years from 1876 to 1879 were 
years of successive bad harvests. The failure of the 
potato crop threatened the bulk of the population of 
Ireland with starvation. The horrors of the famine of 
1847 seemed like to be seen again in Ireland. The 
Irish Members urged Lord Beaconsfield's Government 
to take some action to relieve the distress, but nothing 
was done and the distress increased. Early in August 
it was plain that the harvest was gone; the potato crop, 
which had fallen in 1877 from ^12,400,000 to _;^5,2oo,- 
000, had now fallen to ^3,300,000; famine was close at 
hand. Mr. Davitt had been in America, planning out a 
land organization, and had returned to Ireland to carry 
out his plan. Land meetings were held in many parts 
of Ireland, and in October Mr. Parnell, Mr. Davitt, 
Mr, Patrick Eagan, and Mr. Thomas Brennan founded 
the Irish National Land League, the most powerful 
political organization that had been formed in Ireland 



122 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

since the Union. The objects of the Land League 
were the abolition of the existing landlord system and 
the introduction of peasant proprietorship. 

The Land League once founded, Mr. Parnell imme- 
diately went to America to raise money to meet the 
distress, and while in America he was invited to state 
the case of Ireland before the House of Representatives 
at Washington. He returned to Ireland with nearly 
$250,000 for the relief of distress, and many thousands 
for the political purposes of the Land League. Relief 
was indeed imperative; famine was abroad, and evic- 
tion had kept pace with famine. There were over 1,200 
evictions in 1876, over 1,300 in 1877, over 1,700 in 1878, 
and nearly 4,000 in 1879 — over 10,000 evictions in four 
years. The Government did nothing to stay famine or 
eviction; it contented itself with putting Mr. Davitt 
and some other Land Leaguers on trial for some 
speeches they had made, but the prosecutions had to 
be abandoned. The Land League Fund, large as it 
was, was not nearly enough to cope with the existing 
distress, and fresh funds were raised by the Lord Mayor 
of Dublin, Mr. E. D. Gray, M.P., and by the Duchess of 
Marlborough, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, whose gen- 
erous action was in curious contradiction to the re- 
peated assurances of the Government that no serious 
distress existed. The condition of the country was 
strengthening the Land League and weakening the 
Government. Lord Beaconsfield appealed to the coun- 
try, denouncing the Liberal Party for their sympathy 
with Irish faction. The Home Rule Members of the 
House of Commons issued a manifesto calling upon 
Irishmen everywhere to vote against the supporters of., 
Lord Beaconsfield's Government. The advice was im- 
plicitly followed. The General Election returned Mr. 
Gladstone to power at the head of a large majority. - 
The Home Rule Party in the House was largely rein- 
forced, chiefly by men returned under the influence of 
Mr. Parnell, who was now definitely elected as the 
leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. 

Mr. Shaw and a few friends separated themselves 
from Mr. Parnell's party and sat on the Ministerial side 



HOME RULE— THE LAND LEAGUE. 1 23 

of the House, while Mr. Parnell and his followers sat 
with the Opposition. The Irish Party had great hopes 
from Mr. Gladstone's Government, on account of the 
strong Radical element in its constitution, and because 
it expressed the intention of dispensing with exceptional 
legislation. The Government on its part undoubtedly- 
expected cordial allies in the members of the advanced 
Irish Party. Both sides were disappointed. Truly says 
Mr. Sullivan, ' When one looks back on the warm sym- 
pathies and the bright hopes of that hour, the realities 
of the situation in 1882 seeni like the impossible sor- 
rows and disappointments and disasters of a horrid 
dream.* It was perhaps impossible that it should be 
otherwise. In the excitement of a great General Elec- 
tion, the sympathies between the English Liberals and 
the Irish people were perhaps unconsciously exagger- 
ated, and pledges were, if not made, suggested, by men 
striving to overthrow the Tory Government, which 
were not found easy to immediately satisfy when they 
became in their turn the members and supporters of a 
Government. The Irish Party, on the other hand, 
found that the hopes that they had entertained of 
speedy settlement of some of the most pressing Irish 
grievances were not to be realized as rapidly as they 
had expected. There was thus a coolness between the 
Government and the new Irish Party as soon as the 
new Parliament began, and this coolness .gradually 
deepened into distinct hostility. 

There was soon an open breach. The wretched con- 
dition of the Irish tenants, and the terrible number of 
evictions, led the Irish Party to bring forward a Bill 
for the purpose of staying evictions. The Government, 
who up to that time had not seen their way to take any 
action, then adopted some Irish suggestions in their 
Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which proposed to 
extend for a very few months a portion of the Ulster 
tenant right custom, which gives a dispossessed tenant 
compensation for improvements he may have made. It 
was rejected by the House of Lords, and the Govern- 
ment refused to take any steps to force the Lords to 
accept it. But they promised to bring in a compre- 



124 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

hensive measure the next Session, and they appointed a 
Commission to inquire into the condition of the agri- 
cultural population of Ireland, on which Commission 
tliey absolutely refused to give any place to any repre- 
sentative of the tenant farmers' cause. The agitation 
out of doors increased. The Land League advised the 
people to co-operate for their own interests, and to 
form a sort of trade union of the tenant class, and to 
stand by each other in passively resisting, not merely 
evictions, but exactions of what they considered an 
unjust amount of rent above the rate of Griffith's valu- 
ation. 

Griffith's valuation was undoubtedly a very rough- 
and-tumble way of estimating the value of land, but at 
least it was very much more reasonable to go by than 
the rates of the rack-rents. All rents therefore above 
Griffith's valuation were condemned by the Land 
League, and a practical strike was organized against 
the landlords extorting them. The strike was sup- 
ported by a form of action, or rather inaction, which 
soon became historical. Boycotting, so called from 
the name of its first victim, meant the social excommu- 
nication of any rack-renting or evicting landlord, any 
oppressive agent, any land-grabber. No one who held 
the cause of the League dear was to work for, buy 
from, sell to, or hold any communication with the 
obnoxious persons. The process was strictly legal; 
nothing was to be done to the offender; nothing was 
to be done for him. So long as the League and its 
followers acted strictly within the law, kept simply on 
the defensive, and avoided all aggression, its position 
was invulnerable. The responsible leaders of the Land 
League always strongly condemned any other than a 
constitutional agitation. Mr. Michael Davitt earnestly 
and incessantly denounced all intimidation, all violence. 
Tn a speech on the 25th of January, 1881, he said, 'Our 
League does not desire to intimidate anyone who dis- 
agrees with us. While we abuse coercion we must not 
be guilty of coercion,' At public meetings in the 
county Kerry, in the same month, he called upon his 
hearers to ' abstain from all acts of violence,' and to 



HOME RULE— THE LAND LEAGUE. I25 

'adhere to the programme of the League, and repel 
every incentive to outrage.' In a speech at Tipperary 
he told his hearers not to allow themselves 'to be forced 
into the commission of any crime or any offence which 
will bring a stain on the national character.' 

Unfortunately these counsels were not always obeyed. 
The famine and the accompanying evictions had left 
bitter fruit. Men who had been starving, who had seen 
their family, their friends, dying of hunger, who had 
been evicted to rot on the roadside for all that their 
landlord cared — such men were not in the spirit for 
wise counsels. The proud patience which the gods are 
said to love is not always easy to assume, at least for 
ignorant peasants, starving, homeless, smarting under 
a burning sense of wrong and a wild helpless desire for 
revenge. There were many outrages in different parts 
of the country, as there had been after every Irish fam- 
ine; men were killed here and there; cattle, too, were 
killed and mutilated. These outrages were made, the 
most of in England. Scattered murders were spoken 
of as part of a widely planned organization of massacre. 
People were eloquent in their sympathy for the suffer- 
ings of cattle and horses in Ireland, who never were 
known to feel one throb of pity at the fashionable sin 
of torturing pigeons at Hurlingham. But Ireland was 
disturbed, and for the disturbance there was what Mr. 
Bright had called at an earlier period of his career the 
ever poisonous remedy of coercion. Ministerialists 
argued that within ten months the mutilation of ani- 
mals in Ireland had increased to forty-seven, therefore 
the liberties of a nation of five millions should be sus- 
pended. They forgot that in the same ten months of 
the same year there was a total of 3,489 convictions in 
England for cruelty to animals, many of the most hor- 
rible kind. 

Among the Land League followers there were many 
Nationalists and Fenians, and there were many wild 
speeches made, for all of which the Government re- 
solved to hold the leaders of the movement responsible. 
xMr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, Mr. Sexton, and other Mem- 
bers of Parliament, were prosecuted. At the trial, Mr. 



126 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

Justice Fitzgerald declared that the Land League was 
an illegal body. The Government cannot then have 
agreed with Judge Fitzgerald, or they would scarcely 
have allowed the League to increase in strength for 
the greater part of a year with impunity. The State 
trials came on at the close of 1880. As the jury could 
not agree, Mr. Parnell came back to Parliament with 
greater power than he ever had before. When Parlia- 
ment met in 1881, it was known that Mr. Gladstone 
was going to bring in a Land Bill and a Coercion Bill. 
The Land League's advocacy of open agitation had 
done much to decrease the secret conspiracy and mid- 
night outrage which Coercion Bills have always en- 
gendered. The Government refused any concession. 
They would not even bring in the Land Bill first, and 
the Coercion Bill afterwards. Then the Irish members 
broke away from the Government altogether, and op- 
posed the Coercion Bill with all the means in their 
power that Parliamentary forms allowed. For many 
days they successfully impeded the measure, and the 
obstruction was only brought to a close in the end of 
February by a coi/p d'etat, when the Speaker, interven- 
ing, declared that the debate must go no further. The 
next day Mr. Michael Davitt was arrested. The news 
was received with exultation in the House, and with 
indignation by the Irish Members, who strove to speak 
against it, and thirty-six were expelled from the sitting 
in consequence. 

The severance of the extreme Irish party and the 
Government was now complete. Mr. Bright, who had 
often supported Ireland before, and was looked upon 
as a true friend by the Irish people, was now one of the 
bitterest opponents of the whole national movement 
and of its Parliamentary leaders. The Irish national 
Press was fiercely exasperated to find Mr. Bright voting 
for coercion for Ireland. He had indeed voted for co- 
ercion before in his younger days, but he had always 
been eloquent against it, and his utterances were 
brought up against him by the Irish papers. They 
reminded him that in 1866 he had described coercion 
for Ireland as an 'ever-failing and ever-poisonous 



Home rule— the land league. 127 

remedy/ and they asked him why he recommended the 
unsuccessful and venomous legislation now. They 
pointed to his speech of 1849, in which he said, 'The 
treatment of tliis Irish malady remains ever the same. 
We have nothing for it still but force and alms.' They 
quoted from his speech of 1847: ' I am thoroughly con- 
vinced that everything the Government or Parliament 
can do for Ireland will be unavailing unless the founda- 
tion of the work be laid deep and well, by clearing 
away the fetters under which land is now held, so that 
it may become the possession of real owners, and be 
made instrumental to the employment and sustentation 
of the people. Hon. gentlemen opposite may fancy 
themselves interested in maintaining the present system ; 
but there is surely no interest they can have in it which 
will weigh against the safety and prosperity of Ireland.' 
Such a passage as this might have served, it was urged, 
as a motto for the Land League itself. What other 
doctrine did the Land League uphold but that the land 
should become the possession of real owners, and be 
made instrumental to the employment and sustentation 
of the people ? Might not the Land League have fairly 
asked the Government what interest it could have in 
the present system of land which would weigh against 
the safety and prosperity of Ireland ? Had he not told 
them, too, in 1866 that 'The great evil of Ireland is 
this: that the Irish people — the Irish nation — are dis- 
possessed of the soil, and what we ought to do is to 
provide for and aid in their restoration to it by all 
measures of justice.' He disliked the action of the 
Irish Members now, because they were acting against 
the Liberal Party, but had he not said in 1866 also, 'If 
Irishmen were united, if you 105 Members were for the 
most part agreed, you might do almost anything that 
you liked; ' and further said, 'If there were 100 more 
Members, the representatives of large and free constit- 
uencies, then your cry would be heard, and the people 
Would give you that justice which a class has so long 
denied you '? ' Exactly,' replied his Irish critics. 'We 
have now a united body of Irishmen, the largest and 
most united the House has ever seen^ and you do not 



128 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

seem to look kindly upon it. You do not seem to be act-, 
ing up to your promise made in Dublin in 1866.' ' If I 
have in past times felt an unquenchable sympathy with 
the sufferings of your people, you may rely upon it 
that if there be an Irish Member to speak for Ireland, 
he will find me heartily by his side.' At the same 
speech in Dublin, Mr. Bright said, ' If I could be in all 
other things the same, but in birth an Irishman, there 
is not a town in this island I would not visit for the 
purpose of discussing the great Irish question, and of 
rousing my countrymen to some great and united ac- 
tion.' 'This is exactly what we are doing,' said his 
Land League critics; 'why do you denounce us now? 
Why do you vote for Coercion Acts to prevent the dis- 
cussion of the great Irish question ?' 

But all such recriminations were vain and valueless. 
Mr. Bright had changed his opinions, and there was no 
more use in reminding him that he had once encouraged 
Irish agitation than in taunting Mr. Gladstone with 
having been once a member of the Tory Party. That 
Mr. Bright was no longer a friend to the leaders of 
Irish public opinion, that he was no longer at the side 
of those who undoubtedly represented the feeling of 
the nation, was a matter indeed for regret. A friend 
the less, an enemy the more, is always to be regretted. 
But they had to go on and do the best they could with- 
out him; they could not turn from the course of their 
duty, even because a great speaker and a great states-, 
man did not think and act in his old age as he had 
thought and acted when he was younger. 

After the Coercion Act was passed, one or two men 
were arrested, and then the Government arrested Mr. 
John Dillon. Mr. John Dillon was one of the most ex- 
treme of the Irish Members. Flis father was Mr. John 
B. Dillon, the rebel of 1848, and one of the founders of 
the Nation newspaper. When the rebellion was crushed, 
John Dillon escaped to France, and returned to Eng- 
land years later, under the general amnesty, and was 
elected for the County Tipperary. He earned honour- 
able distinction in the House of Commons by his efforts 
to bring about an alliance between the Irish Party and 



HOME RULE— THE LAND LEAGUE. 129' 

the English Radicals, and some of Mr. John Bright's 
speeches contain the warmest tributes to his honour 
and his ability. Mr. John Dillon, the son, was a man 
of much more extreme opinions. He was imbued with 
the intense detestation of English rule which English 
politicians find it difficult to understand, and he never 
seemed to have much sympathy with or belief in Par- 
liamentary agitation. Some months after his imprison- 
ment Mr. Dillon was released, on account of ill health. 
The Coercion Bill proved a hopeless failure. The 
Government did their best by imprisoning members 
of the Land League, local leaders, priests, and others, 
in all directions, to give the country over again into 
the hands of Ribbonmen and other conspirators, and 
take it out of the hands of the constitutional agitators. 
The Land Bill was passed, and proved to be utterly in- 
adequate to the purpose it was intended to serve. 

With the conclusion of Parliament a Land League 
Convention was summoned in the Rotunda, Dublin, in 
the early days of September, 1881. The Convention 
represented the public feeling of Ireland, as far as pub- 
lic opinion ever can be represented by a delegated body. 
The descendants of the Cromwellian settlers of the 
north sat side by side with men of the rebel blood of 
Tipperary, with the impetuous people of the south, with 
the strong men of the midland hunting counties. The 
most remarkable feature of the meeting was the vast 
number of priests who were present. 

The attitude of the Catholic clergy of Ireland to- 
wards the League was very remarkable. It was said 
at first, by those who did not understand the Irish 
clergy, that the Church and the League would never 
form an alliance. The Land League soon began to 
gain powerful supporters among the Irish ecclesiastics. 
Archbishop MacCabe had attacked it early in the 
movement. His attack had raised up a powerful cham- 
pion of the Land League in Archbishop Croke, of 
Cashel. The Nationalists welcomed Archbishop Croke 
as their religious leader, and he travelled through Ire- 
land in a sort of triumph, receiving from the pesantry 
everywhere the most enthusiastic reception. The 



130 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

priests in general began to accept the Land League 
programme enthusiastically. The priesthood have 
always been the warmest supporters of any movement 
that has really appeared to promise to do good to the 
Irish people. Clerical sympathy with the Land League 
was in itself a proof of its law-abiding and constitu- 
tional principles, which ought to have counted for 
much with the Government. But the Government 
appeared to be obstinately shut against all impressions. 
Instead of being impressed by the significance of the 
ecclesiastical support of the League, the Government 
seemed determined to force the priests and the Lea- 
guers into closer sympathy by arresting, on the 20th of 
May, a Catholic priest, Father Eugene Sheehy, of Kil- 
mallock. A great number of priests spoke at the Con- 
vention, young and old; all were in warm sympathy 
with the League and its leaders. The meeting was 
singularly quiet; the speeches were moderate in the 
extreme; but the country was in a terribly disordered 
state, and even the strong force of coercion struggled 
in vain against the general disorganization. 

At this crisis the Government, for some reason or 
other, liberated Father Sheehy, who at once com- 
menced a vigorous crusade against the Ministry, and 
his entry into Cork, in company with Mr. Parnell, re- 
sembled a Roman triumph. The Government was 
now determined to make a bold stroke. Mr. Gladstone 
made a bitter attack on Mr. Parnell, to which Mr. Par- 
nell fiercely replied, and a few days after a descent was 
made upon the leaders of the Land League. Mr. Par- 
nell, Mr. Sexton, Mr. Dillon, and the chief officers of 
the League were arrested, and conveyed to Kilmain- 
ham prison. Mr. Egan, who was in Paris, and some 
others, escaped arrest. An address was at once issued 
to the Irish tenants, signed by the imprisoned Land 
Leaguers, and calling upon them to pay no rent until their 
leaders were liberated. The Government immediately 
declared the Land League illegal, and suppressed its 
branches throughout the country. The result was a 
great increase in the outrages, and the country became 
more disturbed than ever. The men who could have 



HOME RULE— THE LAND LEAGUE. I3I 

kept it quiet, who had restrained the popular feeling, 
were in prison, and the secret societies had it all their 
own way. This period was disgraced by several mur- 
ders — the murder of two bailiffs, the Huddys, in Conne- 
mara; the murder of an informer in Dublin; of Mrs. 
Smythe, and Mr. Herbert. 

After a while Mr. Sexton was liberated on account of 
ill-health, and the imprisonment of the other Land 
League leaders was evidently a great embarrassment 
to the Government. Private overtures of freedom were 
made to them, if they would consent to leave the coun- 
try for a time — at least of freedom, if they would con- 
sent to cross the Channel to the Continent, even though 
they came back the next day. But the prisoners refused 
any such compromise. They considered that they had 
been unfairly imprisoned, and they would accept no 
conditions. Meanwhile the affairs of the country were 
going from bad to worse. The Government were un- 
able to cope with the disaffection, and the Land Act 
was unavailing to meet the misery of the people. What 
Mr. Parnell has always predicted has come to pass. 
The Land Courts were overcrowded with work; there 
were thousands of cases in hand which it would take 
years to dispose of, and in the meantime the people 
were suffering terribly, and the landlords were taking 
every advantage of the delay. To meet the difficulty, 
Mr. Parnell sent out from his prison the draft of an 
Arrears Bill, to relieve the tenant from the pressure of 
past rent, and this measure was practically accepted by 
the Government, who promised, if the Irish Party with- 
drew their measure, to bring in a Ministerial Bill to the 
same effect. Fresh surprises were in store. Rumiours 
of a change of policy on the part of the Government 
were suddenly confirmed by the liberation of Mr. Par- 
nell, Mr. Dillon, Mr, O'Kelly, and many other of the 
Land League prisoners, and, more surprising still, by 
the release of Mr. Michael Davitt. 

Ever since the suppression of the Land League the 
fiercer spirit of the secret societies had been abroad in 
Ireland. The Land League and its constitutional agi- 
tation had always been disliked by the men who formed 



132 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

them, and the Ministerial concessions pointed at a rec- 
oncilement which they detested. 

The Ministry seemed really to have awakened to the 
gravity of the situation, and to have suddenly accepted 
Fox's theory of the necessity of governing Ireland ac- 
cording to Irish ideas. Mr. Forster, the most uncom- 
promising opponent of such a theory, resigned, and 
Lord Frederick Cavendish, a younger son of the Duke 
of Devonshire, was appointed Chief Secretary for Ire- 
land in his place. Then came the terrible tragedy 
which shattered the fair fortune which seemed to 
have come at last to Ireland. On Saturday the 6th 
May, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish landed in Dub- 
lin; that same evening he and Mr. Burke, one of the 
Castle officials, were murdered in the Phoenix Park in 
the clear summer twilight by assassins who escaped at 
the time. Irishmen shoul^ always remember that at a 
time when England and all the world were thrilled with 
horror at the murder, at a time when the passions of 
men might well be stirred to their worst, the tone of 
English opinion and of the English Press, with rare ex- 
ceptions, was just and temperate. The Irish leaders, 
Mr. Parnell, Mr. Davitt, and Mr. Dillon, issued a mani- 
festo to the Irish i)eople, expressing in their own heart- 
stricken grief the sorrow and the shame of the Party 
and the people they represented. The document con- 
cluded, 'We feel that no act has been perpetrated in 
our country during the exciting struggles for social 
and political rights of the past fifty years that has so 
stained the name of hospitable Ireland as this cowardly 
and unprovoked assassination of a friendly stranger, 
and that until the murderers of Lord Frederick Caven- 
dish and Mr. Burke are brought to justice, that stain 
will sully our country's name.' At meetings all over 
the country the crime was no less bitterly denounced, 
and the Corporation of Dublin passed a resolution de- 
claring that until the perpetrators of the crime were 
brought to justice all Irishmen must feel dishonoured. 

The Government at once brought in a Crimes Bill, 
one of the most stringent ever passed against Ireland. 
They then brought in, and carried, after strong oppo- 



HOME RULE— THE LAND LEAGUE. 1 33 

sition in the House of Lords, the Arrears Bill, a meas- 
ure to enable the tenant-farmers of Ireland, under cer- 
tain conditions, to wipe out the arrears of rent which 
had accumulated upon them. 

In the August of 1882 a National Exhibition of Irish 
manufactures was opened in Dublin, the first enterprise 
of the kind ever conducted by the National Party, in 
complete independence from Castle patronage; it was 
a great success. On the day that the exhibition was 
opened, a statue of O'Connell was unveiled in Sack- 
ville Street, opposite the O'Connell Bridge, and a vast 
procession of all the guilds and associations of Dublin 
was organized in its honour. There was a conviction 
in England, and in the minds of the Castle authorities, 
that such an event could not pass off without some 
desperate scenes of disorder, if not of insurrection. 
But the peace and order of ^Ireland's capital city was 
not disturbed, and the spectacle of the vast procession, 
many miles in length, of the stately statue that had 
been raised to a national hero, of the beautiful build- 
ing richly stored with the work of Irish hands and the 
creations of Irish intellect, all accomplished entirely by 
the Irish people themselves, under the guidance of their 
national leaders, without foreign aid or countenance, 
afforded one of the strongest arguments in favour of 
Home Rule ever advanced in Ireland. A people who 
could carry out so successfully, with such perfect peace 
and order, so difficult an enterprise, might be admitted, 
even by the most prejudiced, to have within them all 
the capacity for successful self-government. 

On the day following the O'Connell Centennial, the 
freedom of the City of Dublin was conferred on Mr. 
Parnell and Mr. Dillon, The same day another popu- 
lar Irish member, Mr. E. D.Gray, M.P.,was committed 
to Richmond Prison, O'Connell's old prison, on a charge 
of contempt of court, which was the cause of a Parlia- 
mentary inquiry into the exercise of that curious judi- 
cial privilege. Mr. Gray was the owner of the Freeman's 
Journal, and at the time was High Sheriff of Dublin. He 
had written in his paper some censures on the conduct of 
a jury whose verdict had sentenced a man to death. The 



134 AN OUTLINE OF IRISH HISTORY. 

judge before whom the case had been tried, Mr. Justice 
Lawson, immediately sent Mr. Gray to prison for three 
months for contempt of court and fined him ;^5oo. 
After two months' imprisonment Mr. Gray was re- 
leased; the fine was paid by subscription in a few days. 
When Parliament met in a winter Session, the case was 
brought forward as one of privilege and submitted to a 
Select Committee. 

At one time during the autumn of 1882, the Irish 
Executive seemed likely to be much embarrassed by a 
strike among the Irish Constabulary, a body of men on 
whom the Executive naturally were forced to depend 
greatly. Some hundreds of police struck; there were 
some fierce disturbances in Dublin — at one time it 
seemed as if the police in every town in Ireland were 
discontented and prepared to combine against the 
Government; but the Government made some conces- 
sions, and what at one time seemed a very serious dan- 
ger faded away into nothingness. 

In October another National Convention was held in 
Dublin, and a new and vast organization formed, em- 
bracing in one all the Irish demands for Home Rule 
and for Land Reform. With its inauguration begins a 
new chapter in Irish history. 



8 

RD ^« 




JAN 7 8. 

ST. AUGUSTINE > 

FLA. % ^ 



